Innehållsförteckning för August 7/14, 2023 från The Nation

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…

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 Nation is delighted to announce that we are relaunching Bookforum as an editorially independent quarterly under our stewardship. Bookforum was founded in 1994 as the sister publication of Artforum and has been a leading voice in US literary criticism, covering the best in new fiction, nonfiction, current affairs, and the arts. Deemed “a vital bellwether of book culture” by The New Yorker, Bookforum has a history of spotlighting emerging authors and offering fresh takes on classic works. In its reviews, interviews, and essays, the magazine will continue to provide smart, dynamic coverage of cultural trends to its dedicated community of writers and readers. But never fear: The Nation will continue to devote a considerable portion of our pages to cultural coverage as well as our award-winning Books & the…

TO DATE, THE CLIMATE MIGRATIONS THAT HAVE ATTRACTED federal policy attention in the United States generally have fallen under the category of “managed retreat.” Recall, for instance, the 2016 headlines announcing that Isle de Jean Charles, La., would receive $48 million in federal funds for a first-of-its-kind wholesale community resettlement project, or the Biden administration’s announcement last year that it had awarded $75 million to Indigenous communities in Alaska and Washington state to pack up and move. “Managed retreat,” or the planned relocation of vulnerable coastal communities to higher ground, is at once a proactive tactical move and an act of resignation—an acknowledgment that, in a warming world, some geographic communities are fated to disappear into the sea. But what should we make of this intense political fixation on managed…

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…

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,…

In a June 28 speech, President Joe Biden embraced the term “Bidenomics” and described it as encompassing “three fundamental changes” to economic policy. He said his administration was “making smart investments in America,” “educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class,” and “promoting competition to lower costs to help small businesses.” Given the fact that Biden is using this framework to sell his accomplishments to voters ahead of the 2024 election, it’s worth comparing it to a similar term that emerged during a very different presidency: “Reaganomics.” In 1981, within months of Ronald Reagan moving into the White House, people started debating what Reaganomics would accomplish. Reaganomics—like Bidenomics—rejected the previous era’s economic orthodoxy. Both economic agendas proposed new theories of how to expand the supply side of the…

MAUREE TURNER GREW UP IN ARDMORE, A LITTLE STRIP OF A town along Interstate 35, down in the southern belly of Oklahoma. By the second grade, Turner understood, without having the terminology to explain it, that they were different. Sitting on their bunk bed one day, Turner, who was assigned female at birth, told their mother that they didn’t really see a difference between boys and girls—other than how they went to the bathroom, which didn’t seem like it was anyone’s business but their own. It was their way of coming out. “My mom was like, ‘You’re absolutely right,’” Turner recalled. “That was when my mom told me that my voice is powerful, and it’s going to always be powerful, and to always use it, and to always help others…

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…

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…

AS THE STEADY DRIP OF REVELATIONS OVER THE PAST FEW months shows, Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to intellectual, cultural, and financial luminaries were much more extensive than previously known. For years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, he socialized with Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, Leon Botstein, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, private equity billionaire Leon Black, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, CIA director William Burns, and Lawrence Summers. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, Summers—a former president of Harvard and the current Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School—had more than a dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein from 2013 to 2016. In April 2014,…

AMERICA DIDN’T INVENT IMPROVISATION, but it seems to have held the patent for generations. Even if, as many presume these days, the nation’s democracy is imperiled, its promise of unlimited reinvention remains its biggest selling point. Nothing exemplifies this more than jazz. The will to improvise, embedded in a society that has always cherished freedom, found its highest and purest cultural expression in an art form whose greatest innovators—from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman and many more in between—were one with all the legendary pioneers of American expansion, whether of inner or outer space. Sonny Rollins is the last living progenitor of jazz’s make-it-new ascent during the 20th century. Like many of his peers, Rollins has at various times been both inside and outside of history’s flow; he has also…