Innehållsförteckning för October 2025 från The Nation

WHEN VERMONT SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS TOOK HIS “FIGHTING OLIGARCHY” tour to rural Viroqua, Wisconsin, in late August, his speech featured a fervent call for ending military aid to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Viroqua, population 4,407, is far from New York City, where clueless pundits and political operatives keep telling us that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s advocacy for an end to the genocide in Gaza is too extreme. But the news from Viroqua offers a reminder that Mamdani and candidates like him are not on the margin of the national debate. Nor do they threaten Democratic prospects in 2026. They’re pulling the party toward the people. The people know that the United States must stop supplying arms and coordinating militarily with Israeli Prime…

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN EXPANDing its war on America’s most vulnerable communities. From the horrific tax and budget act that plunges the working classes into debt and supercharges masked deportations, to the executive orders that demonize the homeless and prohibit algorithmic justice in AI, to the attempts to gerrymander their way to permanently rigged congressional majorities, Republicans have moved to eradicate their deepest fear: a multiracial, multiethnic democracy. They want a government powered by Christian nationalism and techno-fascism. At least 10 million people will have their healthcare ripped away. Immigrants are being stripped of due process, with a staggering $75 billion allocated to ICE over the next four years. Congressional calls for mass deportations and the sweeping criminalization of dissent are becoming features of America. While the unhoused and…

IN THE PAST YEAR OR SO, I HAVE BEEN SCAMMED SO much! A check I sent was stolen from the mail and “checkwashed”—the thief changed the addressee and deposited the check. Purported Microsoft employees tried to get control of my computer by claiming it was about to self-destruct. (My husband almost fell for that one.) I got numerous realistic-sounding robocalls asking for donations to charities that probably don’t exist. Women with lovely telephone voices claimed to have discovered my 2009 book of poems and told me their companies could make it a big commercial success. (Good luck with that!) Just last week, I received what looked exactly like a notice from PayPal notifying me that I had ordered $465 of bitcoin. When I called to say there was a mistake,…

THE PHRASE YOLANDA DÍAZ pérez uses more than any other is “cambiar la vida de la gente” (change the lives of the people). I was speaking with the labor minister and second deputy prime minister of Spain on Zoom this spring, after my first encounter with her last November. A few days after Donald Trump’s reelection, Díaz had convened an International Labor Congress in Madrid. Bringing together labor ministers, union officials, researchers, and activists from around the world, she called for “an international alliance for labor rights.” All through the conference, Díaz, dressed in white, listened carefully and took notes from her seat at the front of the room. Díaz ascended to high office during a time of successive crises—globally, domestically, and within Spain’s fractious left. She grew up in…

EVERY POISON HAS ITS ANTIDOTE. THE GLARING unaffordability of New York City can be confronted by policies that prioritize the needs of working people. The confounding inertia of the Democratic Party can be reversed by bold new progressive leaders. Trump’s assault on our freedoms can be resisted by popular movements connected to people where they live. To my view, the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani offers New Yorkers a remarkable, if not unprecedented, opportunity to act on all three of these at once. Almost 100 years ago in New York, the greatest progressive engine of the past century arose from the ashes of the Red Scare, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression. Labor organizers, urban reformers, and progressive visionaries experienced repeated setbacks early in the 20th century, but they…

AFTER THE DRAMA OF DONALD TRUMP’S MEETINGS with Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, DC, the prospect of a summit between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders remains elusive. Trump had once hoped to broker one, with himself as master of ceremonies. To his dismay, Putin has refused to commit to it. Recently, Trump seemed to push the idea that Zelensky and Putin ought to work it out between themselves. European leaders are equally frustrated. Constantly repeating the mantra “No decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine,” they want to validate it by getting Zelensky and Putin together. But even if such a meeting occurs, it will not be enough. An encounter between the two men has to have substance, not only symbolism. The agenda is long and will need…

AS WE COME UP ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE 2024 election, it seems as good a time as any to ask, “Has it happened here?” Can we meaningfully call the second Trump administration a fascist regime? For most casual observers, it’s not much of a question. What are you supposed to call it when masked and uniformed federal police show up at a political rally for an opposition politician? Or when the president essentially declares martial law in the capital city? Or, for that matter, when the executive is trying to enforce its cultural policy on a nation’s universities and museums? And what else to call it when the administration is trying to cook the unemployment numbers to hide a struggling economic picture? What do you call it when a…

A YEAR AGO, NAN GOLDIN RETURNED TO BERlin to rebuke the German government and its cultural apparatchiks. “This is a city that we used to consider a refuge,” the artist announced from a small stage at the Neue Nationalgalerie. It was the opening night of her career retrospective, ominously titled “This Will Not End Well.” When Goldin first visited in the 1980s, the divided citystate served as an appropriately gritty backdrop for her photos of friends and lovers—a European satellite for the creative demimonde of New York’s East Village. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she lived there for two years via an artists’ residency program, part of a vast federal and state network for cultural funding. Back then, Berlin was “one big underground,” she later recalled. “Everything was extreme.”…

SOMETIMES SELF-DEALING CAN BE SPUN AS INGENUITY. ON March 28, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, had acquired his flailing social media platform, X, in an all-stock transaction. Musk said that the newly combined entity, under the corporate name x.AI Holdings Corp, was valued at $113 billion. Smashing together two of his companies like a kid playing with Silly Putty and hoping something good emerges is a go-to move for Musk. In 2016, he oversaw the sale of his green energy concern, SolarCity, which was founded by his cousins, to Tesla, his electric vehicle company. Musk has become known for a kind of circular economics—what’s been called the “Muskonomy.” As Axios’s Scott Rosenberg wrote after the X-xAI deal, “these dollars are all just circling the Musk-o-sphere in…

WHEN ARNOLD RAMPERSAD’S BIOGRAPHY of Langston Hughes, The Life of Langston, was published in 1986, its treatment of sexuality almost immediately ignited controversy. “As for the increasingly fashionable tendency to assert, without convincing evidence, that Hughes was a homosexual,” Rampersad wrote, “I will say at this point only that such a conclusion seems unfounded, and that the evidence suggests a more complicated sexual nature.” Three years later, Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston claimed Hughes as queer, to the applause of the Black gay poet Essex Hemphill. In 1993, queer studies scholar Scott Bravmann criticized Rampersad for requiring conclusive evidence that Hughes slept with men when he didn’t do the same regarding Hughes’s presumed heterosexuality. Four years later, Charles Nero took issue with Rampersad’s reliance on Hughes’s not wanting to…

SUSAN CHOI’S CHARACTERS ARE AT THEIR BEST WHEN unhinged. Undone by love, lust, revenge, torture, paranoia, mad hope, hopelessness—this is when they really come to life. Choi’s novels are also at their best in the midst of all of this emotional chaos. Her plots can be melodramatic, plucking these characters seemingly out of nowhere and putting them in the right circumstances to blossom into their maddest selves, but this also gives her novels a certain bravado and, at times, an unexpected grandeur. Choi’s characters need not have rigorous backstories or fully fleshed-out pasts; in fact, the more unmarked and unexplained their arrival, the better. The proximity to such incomprehensible, even unlikable characters is essential for the kinds of studies in desperation that Choi offers: She pulls us into the world…

IN JUNE 2014, THREE SCIENTISTS PUBLISHED AN INtriguing article in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers described two large-scale experiments they’d conducted over the course of a single week, during which they’d exposed people to either largely positive or largely negative emotions. The results confirmed that emotional contagion is real: Our moods are susceptible to being influenced by those around us. The more negative our social bubble is, the more negative our own emotional expressions become, and the converse is true as well. There was only one problem: The experiment that the three scientists—Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory, and Jeffrey Hancock—wrote about so excitedly was conducted on Facebook, without the knowledge or explicit consent of the 689,003 users whose newsfeeds were manipulated for that week.…

WHEN THE NAZIS INVADED AND OCCUPIED DENMARK IN 1940, the Danes faced a choice: obey or resist. In an online article for The Nation, Sarah Sophie Flicker details the Danes’ everyday acts of disobedience in the face of the fascist regime. As the organizer and artist explains, the people of Denmark followed a “Ten Commandments for Danes”—a set of moral instructions created by 17-year-old Arne Sejr. The guidance was simple and included such rules as refusing to work for the Nazis or support their businesses, working slowly or doing a bad job when refusing to work was not an option, and protecting anyone being “chased” by Nazis. In an homage to her article, a group of artists and organizers in the United States have put together a “Ten Commandments of…

LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER THE HAMAS ATTACKS OF October 7, 2023, the Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Raz Segal described Israel’s retaliation against Gaza as “genocidal”—a term he meant not rhetorically but literally, based on well-founded legal definitions. “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” he wrote. “Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly.” While Segal’s deep academic expertise provided intellectual heft to his warning, it did not require years of study to see where Israel’s assault was headed; anyone who had been paying attention understood the designs of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, settlerdominated governing coalition, which had been spewing eliminationist rhetoric about Palestinians and facilitating pogroms in the occupied West Bank for nearly a year before the attacks. “It’s a choice to forget…

$1.1B Amount of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that Congress canceled through 2027, forcing CPB to cease operations by January 120 Number of rural stations that receive at least 25 percent of their revenue from CPB 33 Number of rural stations that receive at least 50 percent of their revenue from CPB, many of them on Native American reservations 5,850 Number of people employed by rural stations funded by CPB 66% Portion of Americans who support federal funding for public radio $36.5M Amount committed by private foundations to support local public radio and TV stations in the wake of the funding cuts…

“I STARTED BELIEVING WHEN ZOHRAN GAVE HIS SPEECH AT THE Church of the Village,” Kareem Elrefai told me. On June 24, the night it became clear that Zohran Mamdani would win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, Elrefai was beaming and sweating among the more than 100 Mamdani supporters packed into Boyfriend Co-op, a small bar in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Two days later, on the phone, the conversation was quieter, but Elrefai was just as euphoric. A 28-year-old member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and an elected leader of DSA’s National Political Committee, Elrefai explained that like so many others, he did not initially believe that Mamdani would win the primary. In fact, while NYC-DSA overwhelmingly endorsed Mamdani’s…

AT THE EVENTS SURROUNDING Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, guests were handed small jewelry boxes that opened with a satisfying snap. Inside, metal buttons rested on a plush blue-velvet cushion. Each bore the image of a bald eagle with its wings stretched wide before the Capitol dome, a banner streaming from its beak that read “Reagan–Bush.” The buttons were more than keepsakes; they were emblems of conservative longing. After two turbulent decades marked by civil unrest, oil shocks, the Watergate scandal, and a failed war in Vietnam, Republicans yearned to restore a pre-1960, prim and proper American society. On that day, under a clear winter sky, those gleaming buttons symbolized optimism. A card included with the gift read: “Together, let us make this A Great New Beginning.” Republican organizers had…

IN HER 1996 ESSAY “POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHY,” JOAN Didion performed a vivisection of journalist Bob Woodward’s reportorial method—one that hinged, she contended, on his willingness to serve as a conduit for his sources’ agendas. To illustrate her point, Didion considered Woodward’s answer to the question of why he hadn’t written about the Whitewater scandal, which was then slowly engulfing the Clinton administration. “I do not know about Whitewater and what it means,” Woodward said on Larry King Live. “I am waiting—if I can say this—for the call from somebody on the inside saying ‘I want to talk.’” “Here is where we reach the single unique element in the method, and also the problem,” Didion wrote. “As any prosecutor and surely Mr. Woodward knows, the person on the inside who calls and…

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. HAD MANY friends and many sisters. These two facts, combined with his ardent gregariousness, made Buckley a tireless marriage broker and busybody. Throughout his long life and career, he endlessly stuck his nose in everyone else’s private lives. Of course, as Sam Tanenhaus documents in his massive and absorbing new biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, he was known for many other achievements as well. Buckley was a man of many parts: the most famous American conservative pundit of the last century, the founder of National Review, a key figure in the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s, an intellectual celebrity (thanks in part to his PBS debate show Firing Line), an avid skier and yachtsman, a prolific…

“THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE MEAN THE LIMITS OF MY world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein declared in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his famously oracular 1921 opus. For Wittgenstein, the tragedy of language was the product of neither faulty grammar nor impoverished vocabulary. Instead, it was a matter of some intrinsic truncation: Even at its most capacious, language could represent only a sliver of the world. In a radio essay summarizing Wittgenstein’s argument, the Austrian novelist and poet Ingeborg Bachmann observed that “even if our language were perfect and were able to describe the world perfectly, not a single problem that concerns us would be solved.” Bachmann feared that her favorite philosopher might be right. Still, in her work as a poet and a novelist, she did what she could to resist his verdict,…