Innehållsförteckning för May 15/22, 2023 från The Nation

ALTHOUGH WE COMMONLY REFER TO JUSTICES ON THE FEDERAL BENCH AS BEING appointed “for life,” Article III of the Constitution says rather that judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” Violations of this standard, the Constitution stipulates, are determined via impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate. A total of 15 federal judges have been impeached—on charges ranging from drunkenness and mental instability to bribery, perjury, and treason. Eight were removed from office, including Robert Archbald, who in 1910 took his wife on a trip to Europe paid for by Henry Cannon, an officer of railroad and coal companies that sometimes had business before the court. Archbald’s wife testified that Cannon was her cousin and that the two families frequently enjoyed traveling together. The New York Times…

FEW OF US ARE PAYING ATTENTION TO GUANTÁNAMO Bay right now. But a recent United Nations report reveals that the post-9/11 forever prison is shifting into a macabre new phase: providing end-of-life care for its aging captives with its characteristic brutality. It’s a grim testament to how normalized Guantánamo is in 21st-century America. Some will see the impending detainee deaths as Guantánamo solving the problem of itself. President Biden, to his credit, isn’t one of them. He has accelerated transfers out of Guantánamo, but his approach has a central flaw: Even if transfers could vacate the detention camp, emptying Guantánamo is not the same as closing Guantánamo. And unless the camp is permanently shuttered, it’s only a matter of time before one of Biden’s successors takes up Donald Trump’s unrealized…

Cities, states, municipalities, and nonprofit organizations want to build green-energy infrastructure. But in the past, the federal government has incentivized green energy mostly through tax credits—a system that doesn’t help the public and nonprofit sectors. To get a tax credit, you need to have tax liabilities, which these entities rarely have. But starting this year, something will be different: As a result of the Inflation Reduction Act’s “direct pay” feature, the federal government will provide subsidies straight to these groups, without needing to go through private investors. There’s debate in left-liberal spaces about how to characterize the Inflation Reduction Act, the large climate bill the Democrats passed in 2022. The IRA allocates $369 billion to clean energy, around $270 billion of which is in the form of tax incentives for…

Istanbul AT JUST AFTER 4:17 AM ON FEBRUARY 6, NATURE MADE A LETHAL INTERVENTION in Turkish history. At first I wasn’t aware of the scale of the destruction. Here in Istanbul, we felt nothing—just an eerie silence in the morning, the final serene moments of unknowing. But my aunt, who woke up in horror in her bed in Gaziantep, the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, called me just a few hours later. What she told me I found hard to imagine. Then, just after 1 pm, I turned on the TV. A reporter was running in panic as massive buildings on both sides of the road began collapsing in a new, 7.6-magnitude quake. I saw rectangular forms, each containing perhaps dozens of people, merge into one another, throwing out enormous…

THE UKRAINE CONFLICT—NOW HEADED TOWARD its 500th day—has descended into a grinding war of attrition. Russia’s winter offensive gained little ground. Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive is sapped by an exhaustion of weapons and troops. The costs to Ukrainians—in lives and welfare—continue to mount, as do the pressures to escalate. In February, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, once more suggested that neither side was likely to achieve its objectives on the battlefield. Yet neither Putin nor Zelensky has offered concessions that might lead to a settlement. Never has the need for a global peace movement—and international peace initiatives—been more apparent. Yet, on the left, the most visible voices are those condemning any deviation from total support for the war. Most recently, the esteemed historian Michael…

I’VE BEEN A BLACK PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY FOR 44 years. There is very little about racism that still surprises me. Indeed, being able to anticipate what racist white folks will do next is an essential survival skill: “Surprise” is a luxury I cannot afford when I am so often the only Black person in a room. And yet I found myself in absolute, gaping shock at the actions of Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives in early April. After three Democrats—Justin Jones, Justin J. Pearson, and Gloria Johnson—led demonstrations against gun violence from the House floor in the wake of the Nashville elementary school shooting, the Republican-controlled chamber moved to expel the trio for breaching rules of decorum. By all metrics, attempting to remove duly elected representatives for…

THERE’S A MEMORY THAT HAUNTS LAURA BRUNEAU, LIKE A video playing over and over. She remembers the unremarkable “Have a good one” she gave her only child, Lorna McMurrey, as she dropped her off at the cannabis-processing facility in Holyoke, Mass., where she worked. It was January 4, 2022—the last day Bruneau saw her daughter conscious. Later that day, Lorna texted her that she was “having a hard time walking and breathing at the same time.” Bruneau raced to the facility, but by the time she arrived, ambulances and fire trucks were already there. She watched as paramedics wheeled her daughter out on a gurney, one of them “straddling on top of her, just pounding on her chest.” “I’ll never fucking forget that sight,” Bruneau said. “I lost it. I…

"VOCATION” IS A WORD I ASSOCIATE WITH the trades—a consequence, I think, of attending American public schools in the 1980s. There, “vocation” was deployed as a euphemism for skilled labor. The implication, as I understood it, was that to be a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, was a calling, perhaps divine. The work that was my fate—noodling about in front of a computer—was decidedly less sanctified. I thought about this distinction—between work as a sacred endeavor and just another job—as I began Haruki Murakami’s new book, Novelist as a Vocation. Does the job of novelist require some special quality, an invitation from God, or is it like most work, a set of skills that can be learned? But as I read the book, I realized that the title is a…

ON MARCH 14, JUSTYNA WYDRZYŃSKA WAS CONVICTED of “intent to aid” an abortion. Wydrzyńska is a prominent reproductive rights activist in Poland, a country with a near-total ban on abortion. In 2020, she was contacted by Ania (a pseudonym), who was desperate for help in accessing a medication abortion. Wydrzyńska sent her a pack of abortion pills, but before Ania could take them, her partner discovered the pills and reported her to the police. In an exclusive US interview with The Nation, Ania tells the story publicly for the first time of what led her to ask for Wydrzyńska’s help. It’s a story of determination, of fear, of solidarity, and of gratitude. It’s also a story of the visceral harm that abortion bans inflict on women, and the lengths to…

IT TOOK FIVE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES TO TAKE away the right of more than half the people in the country to end a pregnancy. It took only one lower court Texas judge to ban the most popular method of doing so. That would be Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Amarillo, Tex., with a substantial record of anti-abortion views. On April 7, in a case brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an obscure group of anti-abortion doctors, Kacsmaryk ruled that mifepristone, one of two pills used in combination to produce a medication abortion, had been wrongly approved by the FDA—23 years ago. Never mind that mifepristone is endorsed by the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and has been used safely by millions…

SIMONE WEIL HOUSE IS A CENTURY-OLD ARTS-AND-CRAFTS BUNGALOW with cheerful red siding located in Portland, Ore. The house is on a large corner lot in the city’s historically Black, rapidly gentrifying Northeast neighborhood. Outside, a hand-drawn chalkboard on the front porch invites strangers and friends to community dinners on Wednesday nights. In the front yard, a free fridge and clothing closet signal a commitment to mutual aid. In the backyard of the double lot, housing-insecure guests live in three tiny homes. Inside is a revolution. Simone Weil House is part of the anarchist Catholic Worker movement. A household name among peace activists, the movement is finding rebirth in its 90th year by returning to its roots. Communities like Simone Weil House are the next chapter in the Catholic Worker’s story.…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. VOWED NOT to read another book about liberalism until his mother wrote one. Liberalism was riding high then, and Buckley was probably annoyed by its champions’ triumphalist tone. Over the past four decades, things have changed: You can hardly walk around the block today without tripping over a critique of liberalism. There are critiques by wild-eyed Randians, free-market libertarians, neoclassical economists, neo-Burkean conservatives, Catholic integralists, critical race theorists, postmodernists, and, of course, Marxists. Limits of Justice, but with Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy and What Money Can’t Buy: A few figures stand out. Michael Sandel began as an academic critic of John Rawls with his 1982 Liberalism and the The Moral Limits of Markets, he became America’s leading communitarian…