Innehållsförteckning för February 20/27, 2023 från The Nation

I MET VICTOR IN THE SPRING OF 1978, WHEN HE WALKED INTO THE NATION’S SPARTAN offices on Sixth Avenue. Three months earlier, I had been hired for a three-day-a-week gig as the editor’s assistant by Blair Clark, who had been brought onto the magazine as interim editor. Victor, who was stepping into the editor’s post, had intended to hire someone else for the role. But there I was. And I sensed that Victor couldn’t bring himself to dismiss me. Instead, he arranged for the other person to begin a long and successful career in book publishing. This was my first experience with Navasky, the fixer. The Nation was a very different place then, occupying part of a narrow corner building downtown. Water pipes hung from the ceiling. The wooden floors…

Paying tribute to Victor is something I like to do, hoping each time to loosen that complicated Navasky knot. I’ll now have another go and look back at a favorite Victor anecdote to see if there’s something I missed before. The anecdote goes like this: One rainy rush hour, Vic and I had miraculously scored a cab in the scrum outside Grand Central Station. Just as we settled in, we spied a frantic Barbara Tuchman—historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, and vocal enemy of The Nation—flailing about with no taxi prospects in sight. I was undoubtedly amused and thus wholly unprepared for what happened next: Vic opened the door, dragged me out, and offered a befuddled Tuchman our cab, something she later mentioned with astonishment to a few friends who, like everyone…

I HAD NEVER HEARD OF HAMLINE, A SMALL PRIVATE LIBERAL arts university in St. Paul, Minn., until it burst into the headlines after a fracas over a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. In brief, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history, showed a celebrated 14th-century Persian miniature in her online class, having prepared her students ahead of time. Prater warned them in the syllabus that pictures of holy personages, including Muhammad, would be shown. (No one complained, she says.) She introduced the class by talking about the history of such images, which some but not all Muslims regard as blasphemous, and inviting anyone who didn’t want to see it to turn off their video. No one did, but after class, Aram Wedatalla, a business major and head of…

THE FIRST ACT OF KEVIN MCCARTHY’S TENURE AS house speaker was decidedly ominous: In the early hours of January 7, 2023, he posed for a congratulatory selfie with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right GOP colleague notorious for her early professions of faith in the shape-shifting hard-right movement known as QAnon. As she has moved closer to the centers of D.C. power, Greene has downplayed her past Q affiliation, blaming it on excessive Internet engagement. But her equivocations don’t explain away her other conspiratorialist and insurrectionist sympathies. Greene has since threatened in an online meme to gun down members of the left-wing Democratic “Squad” in Congress, and she recently introduced Steve Bannon at a Young Republicans event as someone who, along with Greene herself, would have ensured that “we…

WHEN HIS DEBUT NOVEL CAUSED A SENSATION in France, Édouard Louis was just 21. The End of Eddy (originally published in 2014 as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule) was an unflinching account of Louis’s difficult childhood as a gay boy in Hallencourt, a postindustrial village in northern France. In this world, the men were monstrous alcoholics, the women were trapped in miserable marriages, and the children were too many. Louis chronicled a community ravaged by addiction and violence and abandoned by the state. He described the working class at its worst: These men and women weren’t just tired and hungry; they were resentful, callous, and racist. To make life even tougher for luckless little Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s birth name), they also proved to be viciously homophobic. French critics were divided…

The first piece Victor Navasky published in The Nation ran in June 1960 under the byline “G. Mennen Williams”—not a pseudonym, but the name of the Michigan governor who had employed the newly minted Yale Law School graduate as a speechwriter. My own introduction to Victor came in 1979, after Kai Bird told me that so long as I was willing to work for nothing, The Nation would be pleased to have me as an intern. My memories from that time are not of a warm and fuzzy or avuncular presence. We interns were basically terrified of Victor, especially since he led through a kind of chemical communication rather than actually telling you things. It was my first brush with negative charisma—and the beginning of a lifelong education. At some…

ON FEBRUARY 15, 2003, IN HUNDREDS OF CITIES across the world, some 10 million people demonstrated against the United States’ impending invasion of Iraq. By many accounts, it was the largest single day of anti-war protest in history. More than a million people jammed London’s center, while huge throngs marched in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and Sydney. In New York City, hundreds of thousands braved the bitter cold to rally against the war. “The world says no to war” was the slogan and the reality. A few days after the February demonstrations, the New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler wrote that the huge anti-war demonstrations were indications of “two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” The Nation’s Jonathan Schell wrote of the movement’s “immense…

On January 5, in a rigorously researched article by Michael Massing, The Nation reported that Ken Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch for over two decades, had been rejected for a resident fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. The reason: Human Rights Watch—and Roth—had an “anti-Israel bias.” Or at least that’s what the Kennedy School’s dean, economist Douglas Elmendorf, told stunned Carr Center faculty when they asked why he was vetoing their choice rather than routinely approving it, as he had always done in the past. (Roth had been recruited by the Carr Center.) Massing’s article raised important questions about Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, the behind-the-scenes power of its donors, the meaning of diversity, the chilling effect of the school’s decision…

THE GENERAL COUNSEL OF THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD, A federal agency founded in 1935 to protect the right of private employees to organize in order to improve their working conditions, doesn’t come off as either a frumpy bureaucrat or a firebrand. Jennifer Abruzzo has the look and demeanor of a fun art teacher. Her shoulder-length curly hair and thin-rimmed glasses frame a face that could be 45 or 65 (she’s 59). On the day I met her in her corner office, she was wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit with a green scarf in place of a tie and bright magenta nail polish. A bookshelf running along one wall is filled with huge accordion folders stuffed with papers, and a framed illustration of Ruth Bader Ginsburg displaying the words “Women belong…

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, every military conflict in which the United States has taken part has generated an anti-war movement. During the American Revolution, numerous Loyalists preferred British rule to a war for independence. New Englanders opposed the War of 1812; most Whigs denounced the Mexican-American War launched by the Democratic president James K. Polk; and both the Union and the Confederacy were internally divided during the Civil War. More recently, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan split the country. At the same time, wars often create an atmosphere of hyperpatriotism, leading to the equation of dissent with treason and to the severe treatment of critics. During the struggle for independence, many Loyalists were driven into exile. Both sides in the Civil War arrested critics…

I was name Victor Navasky. My father 10 when I first heard the was throwing Kennedy Justice around our living room. He’d worked in the Kennedy Justice Department and thought Victor’s book got it wrong. When I graduated from college, Naming Names changed my life by prompting me to apply to The Nation’s internship program. In 1980, with Victor as lead professor, I embarked on my journalistic and political education. I’d just started when Victor asked me to come meet the widow of The Nation’s former editor, Carey McWilliams. Iris needed someone to help organize her late husband’s papers. In my application I’d explained that I wanted to work at the magazine that had fought so courageously for civil liberties during those scoundrel times. I considered McWilliams—and Victor—lead watchmen during (and…

ON DECEMBER 31, CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS published his year-end report on the federal judiciary. As is tradition, the report was a short, perfunctory memo that came and went without any lasting impact. By comparison to the State of the Union—during which the president lays out his agenda for the coming year—the court’s year-end report strives to stay away from controversy or newsworthiness. Instead, it stays in the safe space of hokey themes wrapped in neat historical anecdotes. It’s best to think of it as Roberts’s yearly self-portrait. I always read it, because, like a self-portrait, it provides insights into how the artist sees themself. Last year, the Supreme Court revoked a constitutional right for the first time in US history when it overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v.…

Yes! DANIEL ALDANA COHEN THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY GOVERNMENT has some clever mapping tools to help people visualize the impending climate risks—rising seas, swelling groundwater, flooded buildings. But too much detail can distract from the bigger picture: Miami is drowning. In 2020, a report from the climate think tank Resources for the Future declared Miami the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world. Of course, the city’s future is uncertain—we don’t know quite how much sea-level rise we can still prevent or how well we’ll adapt in place. When I visited a few years ago to talk with people about climate change, many told me that they were sick of outsiders parachuting in to tell them they’re screwed. I get that. And yet in the coming decades, many of the…

ON AN UNREMARKABLE NOVEMBER MORNING, JIMMIE CONNER IS hunched over his laptop at a dining table in an open-concept kitchen flooded with light. The fourth-year student at California State University, Fullerton, lives in the John Irwin House, a residence for formerly incarcerated students just over four miles from the CSUF campus. The house, in a pleasant Orange County neighborhood with a park, a reservoir, and horse stables, is furnished in a modular style. Two chairs by the fireplace sit ready for one-on-one tutoring, a cluster of ottomans nearby can accommodate a study group, and spaces to hunker down with a book or notes abound: a couch by the front door layered with pillows and blankets, a desk tucked into a corner, a fire table on the patio, and a backyard.…

IN 2019, I SCREENED A SERIES OF FILMS IN MY APARTMENT organized around the theme of “Obama Baroque,” a term coined by the art collective DIS, which defined it as “renewed comfort in consumptive excess” following the 2008 financial crisis. Even then, the cultural products of the Obama years felt like artifacts from another era, ready to be historicized—bizarrely optimistic about the power of individuals in the face of obvious, planet-wide decline. Some of the criteria I developed for choosing the films were empirical—made between 2008 and 2014, with a budget in excess of $50 million—and some were thematic (“vague gestures toward anti-capitalist critique”). There was never any question that the first film in the series would be James Cameron’s space epic Avatar. When Avatar premiered, in December 2009, I…