Innehållsförteckning för March 6/13, 2023 från The Nation

FEBRUARY 24 MARKS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF RUSSIA’S ILLEGAL AND BRUTAL invasion of Ukraine. While we salute the extraordinary courage and resistance of the Ukrainian people, the occasion is a sad one, marked by a continuing war, mounting lives lost, people maimed, cities and villages savaged, families displaced. It should also be a time for sober reflection by the Biden administration, which had opportunities to avert the catastrophe but chose not to explore them. US intelligence estimates show combined Russian and Ukrainian military casualties well in excess of 200,000—while the United Nations estimates at least 7,100 Ukrainian civilian deaths. The number of internally displaced people within Ukraine stands at roughly 6 million. An additional 8 million Ukrainian refugees have fled to other countries in Europe—the largest wave of refugees on…

“Watch out there, Jack, there’s people living under here.”—Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug” I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE RACE/CLASS DEBATE AS a live issue in the early 1970s, in the New Communist Movement debates that emerged out of Black Power and Students for a Democratic Society radicalism and the broader anti– Vietnam War movement. Those debates were influenced by a group of activists and writers who had been exploring a race-conscious—and at least suggestively anti-capitalist—radicalism, particularly in the magazines Liberator and Freedomways, and were modeled on understandings of anti-colonial national liberation struggles in what was then known as the Third World. New Communism’s mechanistic Marxism posited racism and class exploitation as distinct domains of inequality, dubbed “dual oppression.” Taking account of gender stratification added a third pillar, hence the…

Life is about tradeoffs. And that’s also true for the Federal Reserve, which is meant to balance employment and inflation. Through 2021 and ’22, many economists saw the scales as being off. While unemployment fell dramatically, inflation spiked far higher than most experts had predicted. We can see from the Fed’s economic projections and public statements that these developments caught the institution off guard. Suddenly it shifted its focus to tamping down inflation, even if its decisions risked sparking a recession. And so last year the Fed scrambled to raise interest rates after having left them at zero throughout 2021. But in recent months, there’s been a turn-around: Inflation broke from its high levels, and the labor market is settling into a fantastic place. Inflation is still higher than where…

WHEN IT COMES TO UNDERSTANDING MODERN POLITICS, analogies abound. We have the 1938 Munich conference as a metaphor for the perils of being “weak” on foreign policy. Modern hyper-partisanship has driven comparisons to the 1850s and the lead-up to the Civil War. With the combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and a new wave of strikes roiling the nation, scholars and journalists have compared our current moment to the 1918 influenza pandemic and the following year’s Red Summer, when the United States appeared to be on fire with strikes and protests from coast to coast. One of the most potent analogies has been that of Reconstruction. The term was coined during the Civil War to describe the plan to readmit the secessionist states and push the…

I’M SO SICK OF IT. I’M SO SICK OF THE POLITICAL platitudes offered by feckless politicians in the wake of the latest Black death at the hands of the police. I’m sick of the speeches. I’m sick of seeing the parents of the most recently lynched Black child trundled out at the State of the Union so politicians can disingenuously clap at their grief. What are they clapping for? Many of the people who rose at the joint session of Congress on February 7 to applaud for the parents of Tyre Nichols did either nothing or not enough to prevent his death. Many of them will continue doing nothing or not enough. Actually, that’s too generous: Saying that politicians “do nothing” lets at least half of these people off the…

AT THIS YEAR’S GRAMMY AWARDS, BEYONCÉ KNOWLES became the winner of the most Grammys ever, but lost the Album of the Year category to Harry Styles. It was the fourth time she lost that prize to a white artist. As widespread incredulity gave way to outrage, a Variety article that had been published a couple of days before the awards ceremony began resurfacing on Twitter. Under cover of anonymity, a handful of members of the Recording Academy, the professional association that bestows the awards, had spoken candidly about not just the who, but the why, of their Grammy votes. Beyoncé had been up for nine awards this year, including the coveted trinity: Album of the Year (for 2022’s Renaissance), Record of the Year, and Song of the Year (both for…

5 Number of years since a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla. 150 Number of K–12 school shootings in the US that have resulted in deaths or injuries since the Parkland massacre 112% Increase in school shootings resulting in injuries or deaths between 2018 and 2022 40 Number of school shooting incidents so far in 2023 1 Number of new federal gun control laws enacted since 2007 19 Number of years since the 1994 assault weapons ban expired 1 Number of Gen-Z anti-gun-violence activists elected to Congress (Florida Representative Maxwell Frost, age 26)…

THE SCENE: A GRADUATE SEMINAR IN LITERATURE SOMETIME in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two directions—either the long-promised wave of retirements and a deluge of open positions, or a decisive sign that the hiring trend line was never going to reverse its downward course. Imagine not quite knowing what would happen—even if that is now, in fact, very hard to do. Imagine, with even greater difficulty, sitting in that seminar as a widely read, charismatic literary theorist stood explaining that our line of work was a profession—one that involved duties and allegiances that extended well beyond the separate institutions that would support our existence in the form of paid employment. The…

“At 15 it’s all tomorrows. At 73 it’s a lot of goodbyes. That’s why you have to make the most of right now.”—Bruce Springsteen, on opening night I WAS 16 WHEN I FIRST HEARD BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, his 1975 masterpiece Born to Run. It was all tomorrows for sure. But I’m way closer to 73 than 15 now, and I know exactly what Springsteen was saying on opening night in Tampa. And I never felt it more than I did then. Having not played together since the onset of the pandemic, the E Street Band seemed changed. They looked new to one another—fresh, eye-blinking, head-shaking new. They’d been practicing in New Jersey, but they hadn’t been together onstage in front of tens of thousands of roaring fans. And when they came…

FOLLOWING ANTHONY FAUCI’S RETIREMENT, President Biden will oversee a changing of the guard in US public health. In the process, he has a chance to rejuvenate a flailing system. But to do so, he must confront the fact that the rot in public health is structural: It cannot be cured by simply rotating the figureheads who preside over it. A gradual medicalization of public health has eroded its foundations and turned it into a plaything of partisan politicking. Consider, for example, the history of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 1953, every CDC director has had a doctor of medicine degree as their primary credential. Given that medical interventions constitute only 10 to 20 percent of modifiable factors affecting health, the CDC leadership’s backgrounds reflect a consistent prioritization…

Ternate, Indonesia THE VISITOR EMERGES FROM THE AIRPORT TERMINAL HERE INTO A WAFT of clove cigarette smoke. Cloves made this island famous. Until the late 18th century, Ternate and the surrounding Maluku archipelago—known by Europeans as the Spice Islands—were the only places in the world that the small aromatic flower grew. In the 15th century, whoever controlled the Spice Islands was bound to make a fortune selling spices at highly inflated prices in Europe, where nutmeg and cloves were all the rage. When Columbus set out on his journey west from Spain, he was searching for a quicker way to get here. When the Dutch colonized the Malukus, they acquired the islet of Run from the British in exchange for another one of their overseas properties: Manhattan. Now outsiders are…

“EVERY JOURNALIST WHO IS NOT TOO stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This sentence is among the most famous in American journalism. It first appeared as the lede in a two-part essay published by The New Yorker in 1989, and then again in 1990 when the essay was published as a short book called The Journalist and the Murderer. Its author was Janet Malcolm, who was on The New Yorker’s staff and wrote lengthy profiles of writers, photographers, psychoanalysts, and many more of whom her writing alone made figures of note. When she died in 2021 at the age of 86, she left behind eight books of nonfiction, four essay collections, and a treasure trove of…

Toadying at Harvard Re “Why the Kennedy School Rejected Ken Roth,” by Michael Massing [Jan. 23/30]: Hats off to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for enlightening us on how university decisions are influenced by wealthy donors, how various American Jewish establishment organizations use the false charge of anti-Semitism to suppress criticism of Israel, and how vulnerable our democratic institutions are to elite capture. To contain damage to its faltering credibility, Kennedy dean Douglas Elmendorf reversed his decision to block a fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, which had issued a report documenting Israeli apartheid. While Roth believes that Harvard withdrew his appointment to intimidate others who might be tempted to criticize Israel’s apartheid policies, Massing’s article also reveals the disturbingly close relationship between…