Innehållsförteckning för August 21/28, 2023 från The Nation

ON JULY 24, ISRAEL’S KNESSET ENACTED THE FIRST MAJOR PIECE OF THE FAR-RIGHT government’s proposed “judicial reform,” aimed at undercutting the Supreme Court’s role as a watchdog over the executive and legislative branches. Passed by a margin of 64 to 0—opposition parties boycotted the final vote—the new law removes judges’ ability to override decisions made by elected officials that are deemed “unreasonable,” essentially granting politicians the power to act with little legal accountability. The cancellation of the “reasonableness clause” would enable Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (currently on trial for corruption) to fire the attorney general (who is leading the prosecution against him) without fearing the court’s intervention. Netanyahu’s personal interest, however, aligns with a more dangerous ideological agenda pursued by his coalition partners. Hours before the Knesset vote, Justice Minister…

WHAT DOES THE US SUPREME COURT’S RULING against affirmative action in college admissions have in common with proposals for eliminating the “racial wealth gap”? Neither will have any impact whatsoever on the lives and material circumstances of the vast majority of Black Americans. It’s little wonder, then, that the group that cares most passionately about both is the upper middle class. Why do they care so much? Because neither is even supposed to have any impact on the lives and material circumstances of the vast majority of Black Americans. Wealth and income differentiation have increased greatly among Black Americans since 1967, when the percentage earning the equivalent of $150,000 a year or more was negligible. By 2018, 7 percent of Black Americans earned more than $150,000. Similarly, more than three-quarters…

In When Crack Was King, the journalist Donovan X. Ramsey delivers an intimate account of one of the most “misunderstood” epidemics in US history: what he calls a “narrative intervention” in the myths that have circulated since Ronald Reagan resumed the Nixon administration’s War on Drugs, leading to the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. Ramsey, who grew up poor and Black in Columbus, Ohio, during the crack epidemic, came to realize that his community was “in the middle of an invisible war.” The Nation spoke with Ramsey about how the era’s legacy can be seen today, including how ’90s pop culture influenced the relationship that successive generations have had with drugs. —Naomi Elias NE: This book tells the story of the crack epidemic, but from below. What…

ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES, CRIMINAL COURTROOMS ARE FULL of poor people, disproportionately people of color, sitting on rows of benches—or, if there isn’t enough room, standing in hallways—waiting for their criminal cases or the cases of their loved ones to be called. When I was a public defender working in the Bronx, I once heard a young Black boy ask his father as they walked into a crowded felony courtroom, “Daddy, are we in church?” My heart sank at the boy’s question, as the superficial solemnity of a courtroom filled with people who looked like him met the tedium of the exchanges that the boy would find himself surrounded by once he sat down. For the words coming from the judges, clerks, and lawyers were not sermons; nor were…

ASKING “IS BARBIE A FEMINIST?” IS A BIT LIKE ASKING “Why would a loving God allow so much suffering?” You’re not likely to get a satisfying answer, but the fact that you’re asking the question can reveal a lot about your situation. In 2023—a year after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in Dobbs, amid a virulent backlash against #MeToo, and as conservatives escalate their attacks on gay rights, gender-affirming health care, and birth control—Barbie might be the closest thing to a feminist icon that we have in mass culture right now. Barbie, released in July, quickly became the biggest film of the year, earning $356 million worldwide at the box office in its opening weekend. The phenomenal success was due not only to the film’s aggressive…

UPON A WHITE HORSE RIDES DONALD TRUMP, MAN OF destiny, determined to recapture the White House and, from there, to purge the deep state. “The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America First,” the twice-indicted GOP front-runner declares in a video on his campaign website. His terrible swift sword is necessary to avert the “nuclear Armageddon” he sees the Ukraine war slouching toward. This is part of the animating premise of Trump’s 2024 campaign to consolidate dictatorial power within the White House. Through dubious assertions of presidential authority and the removal of civil service protections, Trump intends to “identify the pockets of independence” within the executive branch “and seize them,”…

IN HIS BOOK THE MAN WHO HATED WORK and Loved Labor, Les Leopold tells a story of practice pickets in which the late Tony Mazzocchi, then-president of Local 149 of the United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers Union, led a contract campaign in the 1950s at a cosmetics plant on New York’s Long Island. As the contract expiration loomed, Mazzochi knew that the workers needed to get ready for a showdown with management. The key was organizing a credible strike threat. Mazzocchi’s solution was for workers to save for a strike fund and walk the picket lines of other striking workers for more than 35 days, as practice for their own coming battle. “The company was scared shitless,” Mazzocchi told Leopold. “They knew we were having a pitched battle with…

OVER THE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND, MOMS FOR LIBERTY HELD A PACKED summit in downtown Philadelphia, its second-ever national convening. Founded in 2021, the fast-growing group claims 120,000 members in 285 chapters across 45 states, with hundreds of endorsed candidates elected to school boards to promote purging “critical race theory” and books with transgender characters from classrooms. At one session I attended, titled “(Wo)manhandling the Media,” the group’s strategy became crystal clear. Led by Christian Ziegler, the chair of the Florida Republican Party and the husband of Bridget Ziegler, a Moms for Liberty cofounder and Sarasota County School Board chair, the session provided lessons for new recruits on how to get the media—whom Ziegler described as a bunch of “lazy” liars—to boost their chapters’ profiles. A centerpiece of this approach…

IN HIS REVIEW OF SALLY ROONEY’S Beautiful World, Where Are You?, which appeared in The New York Times in 2021, the writer Brandon Taylor took a certain tendency in contemporary fiction to task. In the growing body of novels about the panic and precarity of 21st-century life, Taylor noted, the central characters—often middle-class white women—talk fretfully about “their privilege and access to capital” as a stand-in for an “actual class critique.” But, he wondered, “is that enough?” When it came to Rooney’s novel, Taylor had his doubts. He wasn’t convinced that Beautiful World had successfully converted the chatty despair of its small cast of charismatic characters into an “actual consideration” of the social and economic roles they occupied, though he did acknowledge that the novel at least made a “charming”…

VANESSA LUA, ALSO KNOWN AS AUNT TELMA FROM Shameless, is perched on the curb a few blocks from Netflix’s Hollywood headquarters, rattling a wooden noisemaker at passing vehicles. When the Showtime series played on cable television, Lua tells me, she received residual payments of around $700 each time an episode aired. A check from Netflix, where viewers can watch William H. Macy’s dysfunctional family squabble on a never-ending loop, might be less than a tenth of that. Because Lua doesn’t make enough from acting to qualify for the health care plan of her union, SAG-AFTRA, she supplements her income by teaching film to elementary school students and leading Crossfit classes. “People say, ‘Get a real job,’” she tells me. “I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll get a real job—but when you get…

$498m Earnings of the highest-paid Hollywood executive (the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery) in the past five years $377m Barbie’s opening-weekend gross 65% Portion of Barbie’s opening-weekend audience who were women 64% Portion of Hollywood’s executive producers in 2020 who were white men 53% Growth of Hollywood executive salaries between 2018 and 2021 29.6% Portion of screen-writers in 2020 who were women 14% Amount by which screenwriter pay declined in the past five years…

Suburban Blight P.E. Moskowitz’s article “America’s Suburbs Are Breeding Grounds for Fascism” [June 26/July 3] is an insightful, if still disheartening, addition to the loudening discussions surrounding urban planning in the United States, especially concerning the suburbs. I’m a 24-year-old from a middle-class Midwestern suburb, and for a long time I didn’t know how to verbalize the feeling of malaise that suburbia conjures within me. But now the reasons are all too clear. In too many suburbs around the country, there are too few accessible public green spaces, a deluge of sparsely inhabited or lifeless commercial developments tied together by car dependency, and a pervasive air of individualist classism. From its terrible environmental impacts to its contributions to political elitism and social isolation, suburbia is a hidden blight on the…

IN THE LATE 1990S, AFTER MAKING A “SMALL FORTUNE” AS A STOCKBROKER, Edward Blum quit his day job to focus on finding plaintiffs for lawsuits that would seek to overturn racial equality legislation. Nearly 30 years into his second career as a self-described “legal entrepreneur,” Blum has fulfilled another of his most cherished goals: having the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturn nearly 50 years of legal precedent to end affirmative action in college admissions—which the justices did in June with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The ruling is Blum’s most consequential win at the court since 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which sanctioned voter suppression by effectively nullifying the Voting Rights Act. It also serves as proof of Blum’s…

Sometimes, when everyone is asleep,we rise quietly.We open our windows, remove screens.Bike. Skateboard. Ride into the night.We meet in alleyways,behind industrial buildings,beneath highway underpasses.Tonight, our backpacks are our shadows.Tonight, spray paint,an extension of an arm.We are echoes passing through tunnels.We are tree roots eating through dirt,breaking through concrete.All we want is the quietude of dignity& our own names.Whatever beauty exists, exists for us too.Stars. Ocean. Wings of a dragonfly.Tree bark. Wet earth. Breeze.Whatever beauty exists, also existsin our names:de la Torre. Cabrera. Salvatierra.[] . [] . [] ……