Innehållsförteckning för April 17/24, 2023 från The Nation

WHEN SILICON VALLEY BANK WENT DOWN, MANY PROGRESSIVES, AND MUCH OF the media, immediately pointed to malfeasance, special pleading, and regulatory failures—a conditioned response with a strong pedigree. But if those were the real causes, then SVB (and Signature, and First Republic) would have been isolated cases. It’s clear now they were not. A systemic crisis is unfolding—with a systemic cause. The problem was not (as Larry Summers declared) that a bank should not convert short-term deposits into loans and investments. That is—more or less—what banks do. It was also not (as Elizabeth Warren declared, along with other progressives fighting the last war) that the bank took on too much risk. Its loans were risky—because it specialized in start-ups, which are inherently risky. But they were not failing. Its investments,…

AN ARTICLE IN THE MARCH 3 EDITION OF THE NEW York Times caught my eye as an illustration of what Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields describe as “racecraft”—the alchemy that vests the fiction of race with an apparent natural existence—and how it can obscure the class character of a political program through racial mystification. “‘Excuse After Excuse’: Black and Latino Developers Face Barriers to Success,” by Colette Coleman, announced a “stark representation crisis” of Blacks and Hispanics in real estate development, especially “at the top of the market,” which is problematic “because that’s where developers can have the most impact on communities and drive the most economic growth.” This is also, it turns out, a domain where the much-touted “racial wealth gap” is acutely important: “A racial wealth gap…

VIVIAN THOMAS SMITH LOVED HER APARTMENT. FOR nearly three decades, she and her husband, Bradley, had lived in a modest one-bedroom at 2420 Morris Avenue, just two blocks from the raucous beauty of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The brick apartment complex was a co-op where some families, like theirs, still rented. Vivian, 71, was a retired secretary who had worked for decades at Montefiore Medical Center. Bradley, 81, had also been employed by Montefiore, doing maintenance work before his retirement. Vivian watched her neighbors’ kids grow up. When her own son got sick, her friend down the hall helped nurse him through the long illness that preceded his death. Vivian may have worried about the increasing crime in her neighborhood, but when she walked through her building’s beautifully…

IN HIS CELEBRATED 1873 ESSAY “ON Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche argued that the problem with human understanding is that humanity can never truly understand itself. Even our very language is suspect to the highest degree, born as it is not out of some loftily universal capability, but rather deriving from the messy contingencies of our bodily reality. “What is a word?” Nietzsche hectors us. “The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds.” Reason and its compliant mistress, rhetoric, are also merely “nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor.” In the years to come, these insights into the gulf between language and reality would become the foundations of a postmodernism expressed tragicomically (by means of all those…

APRIL VALENTINE ARRIVED AT CENTINELA HOSPITAL in Inglewood, Calif., on January 9 to give birth. Valentine, 31, had selected Centinela because she would be under the care of a Black physician. In the weeks leading up to her delivery, she had written on an affirmation board messages like “I will not have any complications” and “I will have a healthy baby girl,” The LAist reported in February. But she died the day after giving birth, via an emergency C-section. She never got the chance to meet her daughter. Centinela Hospital is now under investigation by the state’s health department for improperly caring for Valentine, whose family says that her concerns about leg pain were ignored and that she was denied access to her doula. Her boyfriend, Nigha Robertson, testified before…

CONGRESSWOMAN MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE ISN’T EXACTLY famous for her restraint, but on March 15 she posted a tweet that was berserk even by her standards. The tweet showed a photograph of an onion-shaped ball of duct tape, which Greene claimed was an “explosive found by Border Patrol Agents.” This homemade bomb, Greene argued, justified a military response. “Our US military needs to take action against the Mexican cartels,” she declared. One problem: According to Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz, the ball wasn’t an improvised explosive device. When you unwrapped the duct tape, what you got was a pile of sand. Greene is hardly likely to let an embarrassing mistake like that stop her from beating the drums of war. Nor is she alone. Emboldened by their success in putting the…

Springsteen and Us The subheading to Joan Walsh’s article declares “ecstasy and community return on Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 tour” [“Our Lost Years,” March 6/13]. If that’s the case, it must be a community of the wealthy and privileged. I once had the pleasure of meeting Springsteen at a campaign stop in Columbus for John Kerry, but I cannot afford seats for his current tour. In Tampa, tickets went for $199 for the “cheap seats,” with other tickets selling for $299 and soaring with “dynamic pricing” to as much as $5,000. Part of the problem is Ticketmaster’s monopoly. But performers like the Cure have found ways to respect their fans and keep ticket prices more affordable. Springsteen could certainly afford to do the same. MARY JO KILROY COLUMBUS, OHIO Springsteen is…

IN 1902, THOMAS EDISON’S WAX CYLINDER WAS FINALLY STURDY ENOUGH to be sold in bulk, and Americans started buying recordings of music for the home phonograph. There was money to be made from this novel idea: Enrico Caruso’s rendition of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci would sell a million copies by the end of 1903. Soon enough, the 78-rpm record, a brittle disc of lacquer with grooves on each side, became the standard. The technology seems primitive—a needle riding a groove without even a basic electric current—but it could be very loud. Ma Rainey recorded a string of important hits in the 1920s, and the Mother of the Blues still has the power to make a weak man change his cheating ways—especially if you hear her sermon blaring out of…

IF YOU SQUINT AT IT LONG ENOUGH, THE ABORTION debate can look like an opportunity for conservatives to act like liberals—at least rhetorically. In arguing against abortion rights, conservatives cast themselves as brave advocates for an inconvenient moral truth. By standing up for the “little guy”—that is, the fetus—they claim to take the side of the oppressed. Like the most annoying of liberals, anti-choice conservatives can also treat this “oppressed class” as an ornament for their own self-regard, insisting that in their opposition to abortion rights, they provide “a voice for the voiceless.” This co-optation of the best and worst of liberal tendencies by the anti-choice movement is the subject of Mary Ziegler’s new book, Roe: The History of a National Obsession, which surveys the rhetoric and arguments used by…

IN THE OPENING MINUTES OF KNOCK AT THE CABIN, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, four strangers show up uninvited at a secluded Pennsylvania cabin occupied by two men and their adopted daughter. Dressed in jeans and tucked-in button-down shirts, the strangers could be door-to-door evangelists or the stars of a Wrangler ad. Their actual purpose is more sinister: They carry edged weapons that look sourced from a medieval armory. They don’t immediately barge into the cabin, though—the first of a number of curious developments in the movie. Instead, like vampires, they ask to be let in, a request that the cabin’s inhabitants understandably decline. Tension builds and violence looms as the parties volley threats and appeals at each other through the locked door, sparking intrigue as much as concern. Robbers…

ON MARCH 20, THE FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) landed with all the force of a pebble hurled into the sea. Another round of dutifully—and accurately—alarming coverage appeared on the world’s news pages and in social media feeds, but it was barely acknowledged by the guardians of our political and cultural status quo and their corporate paymasters. As many have noted, this latest IPCC report contains no new scientific revelations; there is no news to be broken here. It is, rather, an elaborate exercise in messaging. And what a feast for the “climate comms” crowd to chew on. In what is surely a first, UN Secretary General António Guterres alluded to this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, Everything Everywhere…

116 Number of bills introduced in 2023 so far to restrict or ban access to trans health care in the United States 11 Number of US states that have passed bans on gender-affirming health care 22.9% Percentage of the country’s transgender youth living in those states 1919 The year Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research, the world’s first mecca for trans-affirming health care, opened 1933 The year the institute was destroyed by the Nazis along with the contents of its library, including rare texts on sex and gender, which were publicly burned in Berlin 1979 The year the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which created standards of care for trans health, was founded…

JOE BIDEN HAS GIVEN EVERY INDICATION THAT HE plans to seek a second term. But alarm bells went off when an Associated Press poll in February found that only 37 percent of Democrats want him to run again. The president’s numbers are especially weak among young voters—a critical constituency for Democrats. Even as Biden’s numbers ticked up after his impressive State of the Union address, 45 percent of Democrats (and independents who lean toward the party) still want someone else to be the nominee in 2024. That enthusiasm gap is a real issue for a president who, surveys show, is running even with—and in some cases behind—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. While many D.C. Democrats say they’re on board for a reelection run, we wanted to know what prominent progressive…

The white army of winter spreads across the city. Boilers and radiatorsdie in their sleep, their skin cold to the touch in the morning. The citywears a coat to bed. The city watches the wraith of breath rise in the kitchen. On Friday afternoons, the judges slip off their black robes and drive home.There is no light in the windows of the courthouse. There is no one to readthe affidavit or sign the injunction to shove into the landlord’s hand so thatheat courses through the heart of the boiler and the looping hard veinsof the radiator again, no one to hear the tenant’s story translated, her sonsand daughters shivering in their coats on the mattress, snot on their sleeves. The judges and the landlord home or stopping in a bar…