Innehållsförteckning för May 29/June 5, 2023 från The Nation

AS IF THE PLANET WEREN’T BURNING OR ON THE CUSP OF NUCLEAR WAR, THE White House, the Treasury, Congress, and the press have fired up another round of Washington’s favorite parlor game—Debt Disaster!™ Over at Vox, Dylan Matthews has explained the half-hidden politics. Both sides need a win, he reasons. Neither has the votes. So the search is on for an outcome both can live with. President Biden’s nonnegotiable demand is for a clean increase in the debt ceiling. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s demand is for big cuts in federal spending—to which Biden has no principled objection. These goals are not incompatible, which means that both will be met. The rest is stagecraft, timing, optics, and spin. With a recession looming, a year of spending cuts—to health care, food stamps,…

“IT IS OBVIOUS, HOWEVER, THAT JOB DISCRIMINATION based on racial or religious prejudice is subsidiary to the more pressing issue of full employment. When jobs are plentiful, all kinds of economic discrimination are minimized. When jobs are scarce, and the competition among workers for available openings is sharpened, it is relatively easy to divide employees into convenient groupings provided by the incident of race, color, or religion, and to aggravate the prejudice which leads to an exclusion of minority groups from job opportunities. The basic problem to be solved, therefore, is the problem of full employment.” Pauli Murray, a legal scholar, civil rights activist, and important voice in Black Popular Front left politics, made this observation in the California Law Review in 1945, at a time when the Full Employment…

$31.5t Amount of debt the US government has accumulated over the nation’s history, as of May 4 $16.9t American household debt as of the end of 2022, including credit cards, mortgages, vehicle loans, and student loans $155k Debt held by the average American between the ages of 42 and 57 $26k Debt held by the average American between the ages of 18 and 25 $88b Amount of medical debt reported on consumer credit reports as of June 2021 2.5% Percentage of household debt that was in some stage of delinquency by the end of 2022…

HENRY KISSINGER SHOULD HAVE GONE DOWN WITH THE REST OF them: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and Nixon. His fingerprints were all over Watergate. Yet he survived—largely by playing the press. Until 1968, Kissinger had been a Nelson Rockefeller Republican—though he also served as an adviser to the State Department in the Johnson administration. Kissinger was stunned by Richard Nixon’s defeat of Rockefeller in the primaries, according to the journalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb. “He wept,” they wrote. Kissinger believed Nixon was “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President.” It wasn’t long, though, before Kissinger had opened a back channel to Nixon’s people, offering to use his contacts in the Johnson White House to leak information about the peace talks with North Vietnam. Still a Harvard…

BEFORE FEBRUARY 3, EAST PALESTINE, OHIO, WAS THE kind of place that balanced bucolic idyll with the convenience of urban living. The town, home to fewer than 5,000 people, is both far enough from Pittsburgh and close enough to it for residents to be able say, “We’re a bit in the city, but we’re a bit in the country.” That was before a portion of a 150-car freight train slipped off a track and burst into flames. In the wake of the derailment, East Palestine was transformed into a vision from the Book of Revelation. “That fire was pretty long. It was, what, three or four city blocks long,” said Jim Figley, a lifelong East Palestinian who owns the Sparografix sign shop, a few hundred feet from the crash site.…

BIOGRAPHY WAS ONCE THE ELEGANT MATRIARCH OF nonfiction. Smelling faintly of lavender, she clutched her pearls when the story got too personal, or the author intruded on the narrative to address the reader, or the political machinery showed through the corseted layers of her heaving bodice. No more. Her skirts are shorter now, her research notes briefer. Her authors prance through their pages telling us what to think and feel within a hodgepodge of genres—memoir, philosophy, even a bit of self-help. Lydia Moland’s thorough, fascinating biography of the 19th-century writer Lydia Maria Child fits all of the above. “There’s a lesson here,” Moland writes of Child’s political awakening, in an aside that would wake up even the sleepiest undergraduate. “Even if you resolve never to live your life the same…

ELIAS CANETTI BELONGED TO EUROPE’S 20TH CENTURY. It was a period of extreme horrors that gave way to a slow but determined effort to heal. The scale of the suffering that he and millions of others witnessed in the first half of the century led to the pledge—“Never again!”—that was supposed to define its second half. But history has a way of relapsing. While no conflict since then has matched the violence of World War II, and no catastrophe has found its equal in the more than 50 million people who died—including in extermination camps—Europe in the 21st century has seen a reawakening of the far-right nationalist and racist ideologies that engulfed the continent during that horrible era. Authoritarian governments, nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, antiimmigrant sentiments, the scapegoating of minorities, and…

ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE STRIKE BY MEMBERS OF the Writers Guild of America (WGA), a tweet posted by the writer Emily St. John Mandel went viral. It featured a photograph of a picket sign bearing a tongue-in-cheek threat: “Pay your writers or we’ll spoil Succession.” The words were presumably written by a striking television or film writer, someone like myself, who has been left to apply their creative talent to sign-length slogans. The specific threat was (probably?) fake, but the overall point holds: Writers are central to storytelling in entertainment, and when you treat us unfairly, there will be consequences. As someone who hates conflict but loves fairness, I felt a twinge of anxiety when I joined the picket line. I don’t think I was alone. If it…

FOR FOUR DECADES, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE CLARENCE Thomas has extolled the importance of “personal responsibility.” He has chastised those who “make excuses for black Americans” and argued there is a need to “emphasize black self-help.” He has denigrated affirmative action programs on the grounds that they “create a narcotic of dependency” where there should be “an ethic of responsibility and independence.” He bemoans the “ideology of victimhood” that allows the marginalized to “make demands on society for reparations and recompense.” In light of recent revelations that Thomas has been showered by billionaire Harlan Crow with over two decades’ worth of getaways on superyachts and private jets and various other gifts, none of which he ever reported, the jurist’s long con of principled advocacy for Black self-reliance and opposition to white…

For years, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum has been reporting on the human and environmental costs of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. Lately, she has also called the rainforest home: In 2017, she moved to Altamira and recently bought a small plot of land with her husband. Alongside others in their community, the couple are reforesting land that was cleared for cattle pasture. Yet as Brum makes clear, this reforestation applies not only to the land but also to herself—a process akin to the “decolonization” of the forest and the violent culture that destroyed it in the first place. In her new book, Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World, a knotty work that encompasses nature writing, ecofeminism, and biting polemic, Brum presents a…

KARIN CEVASCO WAS KEEPING A WARY EYE ON THE VOTING RETURNS. For months ahead of this spring’s election, the school board of the southern New Hampshire town of Milford had been the site of intense acrimony. Conservative parents pushed to remove a gay-themed memoir from school libraries and demanded that bathrooms and locker rooms be segregated by sex, not gender identity, all in the name of parental rights. After the school board, dominated by conservatives, banned some students in the town’s middle and high schools from using urinals or shared spaces in locker rooms, more than 100 students walked out in protest. Now local voters had a chance to turn the tide. For months, Cevasco, the mother of two children in the Milford schools, had been organizing parents and community…

Thin with disgustFat with wordless joyAnd patienceThin like the opening of the gateYou pray you’ll make it throughFat like the other sideFat with pubescenceWith moonstone or pearlThin protectionFat as the ripe earth, before it was turnedThe black soil, a dense fruit, unwaveringThe fat trench of the wombYou share with your sistersFat like forgiveness andGod’s Grace that delivers youFrom the enemy of yourselfProper fatFat like a second, third and fourth chanceAs the number of tries it takesFor you to finally get rightDear, don’t mistake generous for infiniteEvery abundance that can be chewed,Can be expelledFat like the girl you always knew you wereThe fat redemption Hope, the innocence they couldn’t kill, swellsWith its daughter…

THE CRITICS AGREE: BEAU IS AFRAID IS A FREUDIAN farce, a nightmarish horror-comedy, a tragicomic Oedipal odyssey. But what does all this mean—that it’s about mommy issues? That it’s funny and scary? That the protagonist takes a long journey; that the film itself is long? Ari Aster’s latest begins in a birth canal and ends with a passage through a murky birthlike tunnel. We cut from newborn Beau’s perspective of the birthing room to his spot on a therapist’s couch. This is a movie in which everything is expelled and nothing is left out. Beau Is Afraid has so much going on that it solicits verbose description, but it is not, as one reviewer has opined, “a heightened reality that’s not meant to be read literally.” It is not a…

IN THE PAST YEAR AND A HALF, START-UP UNIONIZATION efforts such as those at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Apple have been satisfying to witness for those of us hungry for social justice in the United States. We have their backs, and we’ll continue to root for them. But the workers with the best chance of actually slowing the spread of oppressive technology (which aims to supplant humans with artificial intelligence and tries to maximize productivity by surveilling workers and controlling their time down to a fraction of a second) and stopping the Uberization of the workforce (which replaces full-time workers with contractors, turning good jobs into underpaid gigs with no benefits) are in unions that are already established. For example, in 2018, the hotel, hospitality, and casino workers’ union…

ON SUNDAY, MARCH 12, TO PREVENT ANY chance of a systemic financial crisis, federal banking regulators announced that they would bail out the wealthy techie depositors of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, overriding the normal rules of banking. The next day, the Biden administration violated a campaign promise by approving the Willow Project, one of the largest oil and gas developments on federal land in US history. The contrast between these two decisions was jarring for environmentalists, who have pushed to protect the economy from climate-related risks. Their case is simple: Soon, oil and gas projects will no longer be viable investments, for economic, legal, and practical reasons. (The Willow Project already requires ConocoPhillips to refreeze melting tundra.) Once investors see these investments as null, they will panic.…

WHEN ANTHONY GAY WAS BOOKED INTO THE PEORIA COUNTY jail in Illinois in 2022, after a conviction for “possession of a firearm by a felon,” he was placed in a so-called rubber cell, a freezing solitary confinement space with a hole in the floor for a toilet. Being left alone in these conditions triggered feelings of abandonment, a result of his borderline personality disorder and the PTSD he suffers from spending decades in solitary confinement during a previous incarceration. “It made me more agitated, more upset, feeling more rejected,” he recalled. “And I ended up stabbing a pencil into my arm.” After multiple incidents of self-harm, Gay was placed on suicide watch, where he remained for 40 days. On suicide watch, he said, “they kept me in a holding cell…