The Nation August 7/14, 2023

ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY HAS OCCURRED WITHIN THE LATTER HALF OF THE Holocene epoch. The first written records appear around 5,000 years ago, and the first cities just over 4,000 years before that. They are all contained in a sliver smaller than 4 percent of Homo sapiens’ full history. This is because the Holocene, beginning about 11,700 years ago, brought more hospitable weather patterns, allowing humans to store large-scale agricultural surpluses, which in turn enabled the construction of the world we know today. Those conditions have come to an end. In the 1950s, human population, greenhouse gas emissions, chemical production, and infrastructure development began shooting upward, with biodiversity, cultural diversity, and wild habitat mirroring them downward. Nuclear fallout from bomb testing and ash from fossil fuel combustion spread around the…

IN 1943, WHEN THE END OF WORLD WAR II WAS nowhere in sight and patriotic national unity around the defeat of fascist aggression from Germany, Italy, and Japan was at its height, the US Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that the free speech rights contained in the First Amendment barred public schools from forcing students to salute the American flag at morning assemblies. Justice Felix Frankfurter filed a passionate dissent. The court’s only Jewish member, he wrote: “One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution.” This opening line set up a grave concern about the court’s majority opinion, which elevated individual free speech rights over other…

SITTING IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL WHERE I CAME out as queer 11 years ago, I saw my neighbors step up to the microphone one after another and call transgender people like me “confused,” “deviant,” and “groomers.” It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed queer bashing in that cafeteria, but this time I watched my elected officials nod in agreement. On June 20, about 100 people sat in folding chairs at the Marlboro Township Public Schools board meeting to vote on revisions to Policy 5756, which governs how schools in various New Jersey districts accommodate trans and other gender-nonconforming students. The K–8 central New Jersey school district was deciding whether to require teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators to out queer students to their parents. The changes would also let parents override…

THERE WAS A TIME, NOT SO LONG AGO, WHEN EVERY major architect on the planet was “building” in the metaverse, the open-world virtual reality platform (and its associated projects) that was breathlessly bestowed upon the world by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Last year, some staggering names, including Zaha Hadid Architects, Grimshaw, Farshid Moussavi, and the Bjarke Ingels Group, began creating “virtual cities,” virtual “offices,” and even vaguer-sounding “social spaces” to be funded with cryptocurrency and furnished with digital art (NFTs). The rush to move into virtual real estate became a full-on frenzy. In some respects, you couldn’t blame these companies. After the platform’s launch in 2021, the self-proclaimed “successor to the mobile internet” was blessed with the kind of soaring hype few things ever receive. According to Insider, the consulting firm…

THE CONSERVATIVE CULTURE WAR IS BASED ON LIES, misinformation, and fantasies. That’s what makes its foot soldiers so odious when they crawl out from under their rocks and present themselves in the public square: They make stuff up, then demand that their delusions be given pride of place in our objective reality. The problem, of course, is that these delusions have very real purchase in the political sphere—and also, most consequentially of all, in our legal sphere, where we are saddled with six conservative justices on the Supreme Court who are more motivated by what they saw on Fox News than by laws, facts, or the Constitution. The latest example of the danger of a conservative court untethered from facts came on the last day of the court’s current term,…

MATERNITY CARE IN THE UNITED STATES IS IN CRISIS. Since 2011, 217 hospitals have closed their maternity units. According to March of Dimes, more than 2.2 million women of childbearing age live in counties without obstetrical care. You would think this situation would be a major concern of abortion opponents. After all, they are the ones forcing thousands of people to continue unwanted pregnancies that have already resulted in thousands of births. Maybe make sure there’s adequate care for pregnant and delivering women and their babies before you vastly increase their numbers? But no, anti-choicers frame abortion bans as the only protection necessary, when in fact bans interfere with the practice of medicine even in the case of wanted pregnancies. They cause patients to come close to death because doctors…