Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från The Nation

AFTER 160 YEARS OF SUFFERING THE SLINGS AND ARROWS OF OFFICIAL OBJECtion to this publication’s mission of speaking truth to power, it’s easy to get jaded about attacks from politicians. Yet we were still surprised when Vice President JD Vance used a mid-September podcast from his vice-presidential office to go after The Nation. We appreciated that Vance described The Nation as a “well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.” We were less appreciative, however, of his clumsy critique of our coverage of the death of Charlie Kirk, which elided the fact that our columnists condemned the political violence that took the conservative activist’s life while pointedly criticizing his record. And we wish the vice president had gotten his facts straight before inaccurately painting The Nation…

IN AUGUST, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SHOCKED the academic world by announcing that it would be pausing PhD admissions in nearly all of its world-famous humanities programs. While the ongoing crisis in the humanities—that is, the deliberate marginalization and even elimination of humanities programs by neoliberal administrations in order to reorient schools toward more lucrative business, engineering, and tech programs—is not unique to UChicago, the extent of the damage is especially jarring. What is distinct about the university is its staggering indebtedness. According to Clifford Ando, a professor of classics who has been reporting on the crisis for years, the university’s debt ballooned from $2.2 billion to $5.8 billion between 2006 and 2022—an increase of more than 250 percent, and the equivalent of 68 percent of the university’s total assets.…

ON DECEMBER 7, THE ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER Honors will be held for the 48th year, and for the first time, a sitting president will be the host. Having purged all the Democrats from the Kennedy Center’s board, replaced them with loyalists, and named himself as chairman, Donald Trump has also made himself the main attraction of the marquee event. His predecessors in the Oval Office had neither hosted the event nor involved themselves in selecting the honorees, but Trump has bragged that this year’s list—George Strait, KISS, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone—“all went through me,” adding that he rejected a “couple of wokesters.” As for the hosting duties, the president claimed that he was reluctant to take the spotlight. “I’ve been asked to host,” he said at an…

AFTER THE SUPREME COURT OVERTURNED ROE V. WADE IN 2022 WITH its landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I hoped that Democrats would finally get a clue: The Supreme Court is not our friend. It has been corrupted and weaponized and functions as an antidemocratic enforcement mechanism of the Republican political agenda. When it’s not prosecuting the culture war on behalf of white-wing bigots, it’s destroying organized labor, engaging in copaganda, and anointing kings. The revocation of abortion rights was an opportunity for elected Democrats to wean themselves off the anachronistic view that the court is an “apolitical” engine of justice that must be deferred to and respected. The opportunity was squandered. The Biden administration not only followed the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court’s various…

I SPOT HIM FROM ACROSS THE PARKING LOT AT THE INDIAN Meadow Service Plaza in West Unity, Ohio. In the oppressive heat, his Tesla Cybertruck blends into the scenery, its shiny wrap shimmering in the sun like an oil slick. Clad in a bright-yellow T-shirt reading “DUCATI,” he appears to be genuflecting to his vehicle, as if pledging it fealty. When I look again, I realize he is doing squats in front of the Cybertruck’s windshield camera. I approach him—white, middle-aged, friendly-looking. He tells me he reserved his Cybertruck for purchase back in late 2019, shortly after its November unveiling in Los Angeles. What attracted him most to the vehicle, he says, was its unique appearance and its durability. The latter claim strikes me as ironic. At that inaugural event…

PUP IS BACK. THE CANADIAN PUNK ROCKERS—WHOSE name stands for Pathetic Use of Potential, a sentiment I can get behind—just put out their fifth studio album, evocatively titled Who Will Look After the Dogs? And as the title implies, it’s about relationships—the bad ones. Those love affairs that curdle, those forms of dislike you can only really cultivate when you know someone a little too well. PUP has always been forthright regarding what their albums are about—from their breakout second album, The Dream Is Over, to their punk-rock classic Morbid Stuff. And that’s the case here, too. The first verse of this blistering 35-minute record is: “Staring into the void now / You’re going down with the ship / You’re taking me with you / I don’t need to resist,…

SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING IN FARAWAY NEPAL—the first revolution not only powered by network technology but also in many respects about it. In a week-long blaze of fury, young protesters belonging to a movement known simply as “Gen Z” burned the Parliament, the Supreme Court, multinational businesses, and the homes of disfavored politicians, some of whom were chased down and beaten by mobs. The Brahmin Communist prime minister, KP Sharma Oli, resigned, and the movement’s leaders entered into discussions with the army, which has historically answered to the monarchy, to form a new government. On September 15, one week after the start of riots that claimed at least 72 lives—most of whom were protesters killed by police—the dead were honored as “Gen Z martyrs.” The new regime is headed, for…

THERE’S A CORRUPT SCHEMER BORN EVERY MINUTE, and US history is filled with presidents who have pressured businesses to serve their political agendas. The fact that Donald Trump is epically brazen and selfish only underscores the need for real anticorruption measures. We cannot just rely on hope, shame, or anger to curtail such abuses; the protections must be structural. After late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel criticized Trump and his followers last month for seeking “to score political points” from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Brendan Carr, Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened retaliation: “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC.” ABC quickly suspended Kimmel, and only after a massive public outcry did the…

13.5% Portion of US households that are food-insecure 6.8M Number of Americans who experience severe food insecurity 10M Number of children who live in poverty $186B Amount that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will cut from food stamps over the next 10 years 4M Number of people who will lose some or all of their food assistance under the law 7.5% Portion of Black Americans who are unemployed 3.7% Portion of white Americans who are unemployed $892B Amount of military spending approved by the House in early September…

POLL AFTER POLL IN RECENT MONTHS has revealed that, while approval ratings for Donald Trump are tanking and are also down for congressional Republicans, attitudes toward the Democratic Party are even more negative. And, as The Christian Science Monitor has pointed out, “One subgroup driving the Democrats’ poor ratings [is] their own base. A recent CNN poll found that Democratic voters currently hold far more negative views of their own party than Republican voters do of theirs. At town hall events and in focus groups, frustrated Democrats say they want their representatives to push back harder against the Trump administration.” Surveys show a mounting anger on the part of grassroots Democrats with party leaders, who are seen as having failed to mount a coherent opposition to congressional Republicans or to…

MORE THAN A YEAR HAS PASSED SINCE THE INTERNATIONAL COURT of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, issued its first order in the landmark case brought against Israel by South Africa, which contends that Israel has been committing acts of genocide in its war in Gaza. The ICJ found that “with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide…and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance,” South Africa’s case was “plausible.” Plausible: a restrained word that, in this context, fails to convey the harsh truth of the war Israel has been conducting. Palestinians are being starved, displaced, and slaughtered. More than 60,000 Palestinians have died, and 1.9 million are being brutally displaced, in a manner eerily similar to the…

KARL MARX NEVER VISITED THE UNITED States, but he was long fascinated by the lure—and contradictions—of American freedom. As a young man, he applied for permission to emigrate to Texas. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the debates gripping the Young Hegelians as Europe’s old order crumbled in the 1840s. Later, he would correspond with many of his contemporaries who traveled across the Atlantic, including a set of comrades who would go on to publish two of his outstanding early works: The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels, published in German and French in 1838 and in English in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German, in New York, in 1852. More surprisingly, Marx’s gifts as an essayist and social observer led The New York…

Editor’s note: Recently, 160 people at the University of California, Berkeley, were notified that their names had been sent to the Trump administration—specifically, the Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights—as part of a federal investigation targeting “alleged antisemitic incidents.” The people named included faculty, students, and staffers, although none were informed of any specific allegations against them. “We’re in Kafka-land,” observes Judith Butler, who learned in September that they were one of the people on the list. The internationally renowned philosopher, who for decades has been among the most prominent members of UC Berkeley’s academic community, is also one of many Jewish scholars who have been sharply critical of the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza. Upon learning of the university’s actions, Butler wrote a stirring response, which…

ON SEPTEMBER 2, THE US MILITARY SANK A GO-FAST boat in the southern Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, killing 11. The United States then hit two more boats, on September 15 and 19, killing another six people. The Army attacked another craft off Venezuela’s coast in early October, reporting four fatalities on board. Trump has also since notified Congress that the US is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels in the region. The murders were premeditated. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order designating Latin American drug cartels as terrorist organizations. A month later, the State Department added Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua to the list. On August 8, The New York Times reported that Trump had “secretly signed a directive to the…

The concept of artificial intelligence, if not the precise phrase, first appeared in The Nation in 1958, in a review of the Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain. Published a year after the author’s death, the book sketched out a then-novel analogy between the functioning of early computers and the human mind. The Nation’s reviewer, Max Black, praised von Neumann’s earlier formulation of game theory as “one of the intellectual monuments of our time.” Had he lived longer, Black lamented, the scientist “might have constructed an even more important theory of computing machines. Such ‘artificial brains’ may eventually transform our culture, but our theoretical grasp of their underlying principles is still relatively crude and unsystematic.” Black did not mention von Neumann’s military ties. A…

Republicans may think they can achieve salvation through Christ, but they know that they can achieve victory through the courts. Republican voters do not vote for primary candidates who don’t focus on the courts, and that is the key reason they have been able to reshape this branch of government in their image. In contrast, Democrats have dropped the ball on this issue. Democratic voters regularly vote for senators and even presidents who do not care about the courts and are unwilling to challenge their authority. I believe this is largely because of information asymmetry between the parties’ voters on this issue. Republican candidates use a tight lexicon to convey where they stand on the courts—think “supports the Second Amendment” or “believes in the original Constitution”—while Democrats are all over…

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1945, THE leaders of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, faced a momentous decision. The original motive for developing the atomic bomb—the need to counter a possible German A-bomb—had evaporated in May with the end of the war in Europe, and many atomic scientists were opposed to the use of such a weapon on Japan (then already on the brink of surrender). Nonetheless, top officials at Los Alamos, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, chose to accelerate work on the bomb, enabling the fateful attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In doing so, they knowingly ignited a global nuclear arms race that persists to this day. We might think of this deeply consequential decision sequence as an “Oppenheimer moment”—a time when senior officials choose to unleash…

EVER SINCE DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION IN 2016, LIBERals and the left have struggled to understand the meaning of his rise, and that of “Trumpism,” for American politics. When Trump entered the political scene, he was hard to take seriously. In his first campaign, he seemed—initially, at least—to be a zombie headline straight from the New York Post’s “Page Six”: a faded reality-TV star, a bankrupt real estate speculator, a huckster, a creep, and a punch line. Even after he won the election, many liberals refused to recognize that he was all of those things and also the president of the United States. Having placed their hopes in Hillary Clinton, they marched to slogans like “Not My President.” Trump might be in the White House, but it was unfathomable to view…

ONE IMAGINES CHESTER HIMES AS A SPECIES OF CACTUS lurking along the edges of the literary landscape: arresting, prickly, and resilient, stinging harshly when pressed too hard or approached too indelicately—and yet carrying enough water beneath its tough hide to refresh, even renew the landscape around it. In a lifetime beset with neglect, struggle, and scorn, that is exactly what Himes did. He wrote and wrote, channeling his anger, taking risks, and leaving behind a shelf of more than 20 books, the best known of which were his detective stories set in Harlem—a place he didn’t actually spend as much time in as he had in the Midwest, where he’d begun writing while serving prison time during the 1930s, or in Europe, where he’d moved in the 1950s after a…

Fishy, my mother calls her lymph nodes. She tells meher voice box is a box full of cancer. She says oncea doctor spilled my brother’s tumor trying to take it out. I search “cancer images” and my screen tiles and fillswith splattered burrs leaking radiance from undertheir hems. Each has landed on the surface of a moon. I think of the man who took the wasps’ nests downfrom our eaves. I think of the two-sided utensilwith which my mom scooped cantaloupe into marbles— some taws, some peewees—to suspend in jello. I do notknow whether the surgeon will scoop or scrapemy mother’s windpipe clean. But then, nothing rests on my knowing whether a tumor is more bowl or balloon,more shadow or lump. For that, there is the Canadian doctorfor whom my…