Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från The Nation

FOR FANS OF DASHIELL HAMMETT’S PRIVATE EYE, the new AMC series Monsieur Spade offers a chance to pick up where John Huston’s 1941 film leaves off. The year is 1963, the setting southern France, where the 60ish, retired Sam Spade—played by Clive Owen with a slightly broader American accent than he deployed in Inside Man—is supposed to have come to deliver the daughter of Brigid O’Shaughnessy (the femme fatale from The Maltese Falcon) to her grifter father. True to Hammett (and his rival, Raymond Chandler), the plot can be confusing. But the atmospherics of rural France—still reckoning with its Vichy past while its ongoing, and increasingly rancid, colonial war in Algeria also comes home—are superb. However, there is one plot point I found particularly hard to swallow. The housekeeper’s grandson,…

PRESIDENT BIDEN CONSISTENTLY POLLS HORRIBLY on the economy, giving Donald Trump an enormous edge on this key issue. More than half the public thinks unemployment is at a record high and the economy is in a recession. These negative views are disturbing, since if people continue to believe that Trump is a better economic steward, it will be hard for Biden to win the election. But they’re extra alarming because they’re 180 degrees at odds with reality. It’s worth highlighting some key facts about the economy under Biden. First, the unemployment rate is 3.7 percent. It has been under 4 percent for 24 consecutive months, a streak that has not been matched in more than half a century. Unemployment is an issue not only for the roughly 6 million people…

SOME BAD IDEAS NEVER DIE. FOR EXAMPLE: WOMEN need to have more kids, and would do so if (a) they had no choice, (b) the government threw a modest bit of support their way, or (c) they weren’t so selfish. In a recent press conference, French President Emmanuel Macron called for “demographic rearmament,” an alarming phrase whose militaristic overtones and sexist assumptions drew widespread objections and the inevitable comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale. Macron is being pressed hard by the French right, led by Marine Le Pen, so it’s not an accident that at the same press conference he called for school uniforms, making children memorize the national anthem, a crackdown on illegal immigration and drug gangs, and, rather sweetly, classes in drama and art history. Memorizing “La Marseillaise”—sure, why…

Ali Abu Awwad is a Palestinian activist who has been an advocate of nonviolent action for 20 years. He was recently awarded the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2023. He spoke with Ray Suarez, who has covered international affairs for nearly four decades and is now the host of the public radio program On Shifting Ground. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. RS: You’ve been on the ground in the West Bank for decades, fighting for a peaceful solution for Palestinian freedom and Israeli security. Did the October 7 Hamas attack push people away from where you want them to be? AAA: I think people concentrate too much on events. What have we been expecting from Jewish people who are living and spending…

Modern Midwifery Moira Donegan focuses on the 1950s language of “natural” birth and the 1970s alternative of “hippie” birth in her review of Allison Yarrow’s new book, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood, but that misses the contemporary discussion in the midwifery movement [“More Than a Natural Function,” December 25, 2023/January 1, 2024]. Yarrow disagrees with the “natural” birth method as created by the British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read, which was about being a good hospital patient rather than centering the physiological and emotional needs of the person giving birth. Donegan sees that disagreement as an “inconsistency” in Yarrow’s book, but Yarrow is arguing that giving birth against gravity (as hospitals forced women to do), being denied food or drink while hooked to IV poles, and not having…

ONCE UPON A TIME, SOME 60 OR 70 YEARS AGO, JEWISH American writing constituted a significant genre in our national literature. The experience of being Jewish in America became metaphorical in the hands of a multitude of writers endowed with talents both small and large. So great was the influence of this writing at that time that it changed the American language and galvanized imaginative storytelling around a postwar world badly in need of newly invigorating voices. Two of its pathbreaking stars were Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, both of whose work was characterized by a compulsive brilliance, an exuberant nastiness, and a take-no-prisoners humor edged in self-laceration. However, a third Jewish American writer of major importance also emerged in the 1950s: Bernard Malamud. His voice sounded nothing at all…

how does the sun set?like snowwhat color is the sea?wideJonah are you salty?I’m saltyJonah are you a flag?I’m a flagall the fireflies are resting what are the stones like?greenhow do doggies play?like the poppyJonah are you a fish?I’m a fishJonah are you a sea urchin?I’m a sea urchinlisten to the murmur Jonah is the roe rushing through the forestJonah am I watching the mountain breatheJonah are all the houseshave you heard about the rainbow?what is dew like?are you asleep? (Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry)…

AT THE RISK OF DEFLATING JOE BIDEN’S EGO, LET’S BE HONEST: THE PRIORITY IN 2024 is not his reelection. It is Donald Trump’s defeat. To forge a coalition that can beat Trump and the Trump-aligned congressional Republicans, Biden must present his bid for a second term as the essential vehicle for derailing a self-proclaimed dictator-in-waiting who is uniquely unfit to occupy the Oval Office. But Biden must first assuage concerns about his own fitness, concerns that spiked after special counsel Robert Hur, a GOP appointee of Biden’s Justice Department, rejected charging the president with the illegal possession of classified documents but then salted his February 8 report with brutal barbs about Biden’s age and mental acuity. Hur’s words, however gratuitous, tapped into a serious issue with voters, 62 percent of…

ARE WE IN AN UPSURGE OF LABOR ORGANIZING? And if we are, what does that mean for workers trying to organize their unions to win the changes they need? The tight labor market signaled by the Great Resignation—when so many workers took individual action, leaving jobs and employers they hated—has converged with other economic and cultural trends to create a unique set of conditions that support union organizing. From Trader Joe’s to Apple to smaller, regional chains and one-off kitchen shops, workers have been turning individual indignation into collective action to change the quality of their work lives by staying put and transforming their workplaces rather than hopping between shitty jobs. But once the unemployment rate begins to rise again and it becomes harder to walk away, it will matter…

In the United States in the 19th century, it was not uncommon for pregnancies to begin early in a woman’s life and continue until menopause. Care of children excluded women from civic life, leaving them with very little say in the rules of the society they steadily reproduced. Only since the emergence of rubber barrier contraceptives in the mid-1800s, the availability of hormonal birth control in 1960, and the legalization of abortion in the US (in 1973) and elsewhere, have women (and men) around the world been able to reliably control their procreation. Unsurprisingly, the US fertility rate fell significantly over that period. But even after the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, enabling (some) women to vote, women’s representation in Congress remained less than 5 percent until the late 1980s…

YOU CAN TELL THAT AN ETHNIC GROUP IS REALLY flourishing in the United States when they start to produce prominent xenophobes and racists, particularly of the anti-Black variety. The trajectory from victim to victimizer is one of the surest markers of upward social mobility. In 1993, Toni Morrison ruefully noted in Time magazine that assimilation means immigrants must join “freely in this most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born Black population.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ramparts of white supremacy were maintained by old-school Protestants who organized groups like the Know Nothings and the second Ku Klux Klan to terrorize not just people of color but also Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans. In the 21st century, the…

Hoopa Valley Reservation, California THE HOOPA FIRE DEPARTMENT IS A FORTRESS OF PINEWOOD AND EGG-shell-colored sheet metal against a backdrop of evergreen-blanketed hills. As the nerve center of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s emergency response services, it has taken on a new, existential importance in recent years, as climate change brings more frequent and intense wildfires to the reservation and surrounding area here in Northern California. Greg Moon, the tribe’s former fire chief and director of emergency services, recalls the 2020 wildfire season as especially brutal. At the height of the Covid-19 lockdown, when the tribal government was operating as a skeleton crew, two substantial fires merged in the Trinity Alps wilderness, just east of Hoopa, to form the Red Salmon Complex fire. The walls of the fire department’s training room…

READING SARA AHMED’S THE FEMINIST KILLJOY HANDBOOK comes as a great relief—and not just to me: Upon reading it, my friends report laughing or crying with recognition and gratitude. For too many who are living in subjugated conditions, isolation and self-doubt can become corrosive. Reading Ahmed, one feels relief from living alone with the feeling that when one spoke up, one was too much, too direct, repeated the same thing too often, interrupted someone else’s offensive speech too many times, spoke when one knew the audience was either not listening or, worse, offering an occasional nod as an empty and pacifying gesture. Currently an independent scholar, Sara Ahmed is a leading theorist who works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies and whose writing is acclaimed both inside…

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE 10TH AND FINAL EPIsode of Showtime’s The Curse, the laws of physics spontaneously change. Without warning or explanation, Asher (Nathan Fielder) is suddenly sucked up off the ground by a force apparently trying to eject him from the earth’s atmosphere; simultaneously, his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), goes into labor. The last half-hour cuts between confused firefighters trying to coax a terrified Asher to let go of the tree branch he’s clinging to for dear life—they’ve done this before, they assure him, for “tons of bears”—and surprisingly graphic scenes from Whitney’s C-section delivery. Before this point, The Curse hewed closely to reality—often too close for comfort—as it followed Asher and Whitney Siegel, would-be reality stars on the HGTV network, in their efforts to transform a small New…

AT A CAMPAIGN RALLY IN MANASSAS, VA., ON THE NIGHT that Donald Trump effectively locked up the Republican Party’s nomination by winning the New Hampshire primary, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off their reelection campaign. They focused on a single issue: abortion rights. The two incumbents, and their spouses, gave speeches about the need to “restore Roe” and put the blame for its revocation squarely at Trump’s feet. “Let there be no mistake,” Biden said. “The person most responsible for taking away this freedom in America is Donald Trump. The reason women are being forced to travel across state lines for healthcare is Donald Trump…. The reason their fundamental right has been stripped away is Donald Trump.” Biden’s decision to make abortion rights central to his…

3 Number of ways that tunnels are commonly built today 12 Number of men charged in the “Chabad tunnel riot” in Brooklyn in January 33 Number of kilometers in Montreal’s underground pedestrian tunnel network 17 Number of days that 41 workers were trapped in a tunnel under the Himalayas in November $450M Amount raised by Elon Musk’s Hyperloop One, which proposed shuttling people in a tunnel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 35 minutes 0 Number of hyperloop tunnels built before the company folded in December…

ON A WARM NIGHT THIS PAST NOVEMber, members of Los Angeles’s political and business elite gathered in the backyard of a $12 million Beverly Hills estate to launch a campaign targeting a group of progressive officials who have upended local politics by promoting renter protections, affordable housing, workers’ rights, unarmed crisis response to many public-safety calls, and campaign finance reforms. Headlined by Rick Caruso—a billionaire real estate developer and Republican-turned-Democrat who ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 2022—the event was billed as the start of an effort to “reverse the tide of DSA extremists,” referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. The organizers announced the formation of a new PAC, Thrive LA, and the hiring of several veteran Democratic political consultants to guide a seven-figure campaign to unseat City…

DO POLITICAL PARTIES MAKE COALItions, or do coalitions make political parties? In American electoral commentary, the commonsense view is that parties stand for certain principles or policies—on gun control, say, or taxes, or abortion—and then ordinary voters line up with the party that is closest to their own beliefs. But for Karl Marx and his acolytes, this view of parties was nonsense. Political parties were defined not by their stated platforms but by the character of their social base. This fact did not need to be reduced to mere “egoistic class interest,” Marx contended in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; nor did it require a rigid view of social class itself. The party representing the petty bourgeoisie in 19th-century France, for example, was not composed only of “shopkeepers or…

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY SINCE THE FIRST PINK FRIDAY. Released in 2010, the album cemented Nicki Minaj’s status as one of the brightest stars of her generation of rappers and launched her to global stardom. Pink Friday was also eclectic: It showcased Minaj’s flair for switching up flows, for fun and often funny character work, and above all, it was weird; it sounded like nothing else in the mainstream. Now, more than a decade later, we finally have an official sequel. In the interim, Nicki put out three studio albums—Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (2012), The Pinkprint (2014), and Queen (2018)—that confirmed her reputation as the queen of rap and as pop royalty. Pink Friday 2, however, is a little less groundbreaking. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard…