Innehållsförteckning för December 2025 från The Nation

ZOHRAN MAMDANI HAS NO HIGHER RESPONSIBILITY THAN TO BE A GREAT MAYOR of New York City. It is, after all, his job, now that more than a million New Yorkers have overwhelmingly elected him to the highest office of America’s largest and most dynamic municipality. Yet, as he succeeds, Mamdani has the potential to transform not just a city but the politics of a nation that desperately needs a robust antidote to Donald Trump’s oppressions. As Mamdani told The Nation after his Democratic primary win in June, “You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.” What took Mamdani’s candidacy from impossible to inevitable was his fundamental understanding that to prove the worth of democracy, leaders must make the lives of the people who elect them…

ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, MORE THAN 7 MILLION people took to the streets in thousands of events across the country, proudly declaring that we have no kings in America. Aerial camera shots of throngs of people marching down the streets of Chicago, New York, Boston, and Atlanta gave me chills. But similar pictures coming out of Billings, Montana; Boise, Idaho; and Hammond, Louisiana (where Trump won in 2024), as well as Richmond, Kentucky (where he won the last three elections), gave me hope. There is an abundance of energy to fight Trump and build a bigger, better, more ambitious democracy that works for everyone. Trump may have won the popular vote (barely), but he is not popular, and if we can capitalize on that, we can secure what historians call…

MAGAZINES TAKE A FEW MONTHS TO PUT TOGETHER, so I’m writing my annual holiday donations column in October. It isn’t even Halloween yet! Things look bleak right now, but by the time you read these words, who knows? Maybe Zohran Mamdani will be mayor-elect of New York, all those candidates you wrote postcards for will have won, Donald Trump will have run off to a Buddhist monastery, and JD Vance will have quit to start the Cat Lovers for Taylor Swift Fan Club. Sign me up, JD! Even if all these wonderful things happen, the world will still need your help. So, Nation readers of the not-so-distant future, reach deep into your pockets and give generously to any and all of these groups. 1. Fistula Foundation. Obstetric fistula is a…

First Time as Tragedy Re “These Dis-United States” [160th Anniversary Issue, July/August 2025]: Congratulations are in order to The Nation for being a thorn in the side of authoritarianism for 160 years. I was disappointed, however, that there was no mention of The Nation’s reporting on the Alger Hiss case (which, thanks to Carey McWilliams and Victor Navasky, is part of the magazine’s legacy) and the publication this year of evidence establishing his innocence. My new book, Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, not only exonerates him, but it ties what’s going on today to the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and ’50s, when the right used Hiss as part of an attempt to destroy liberalism and civil liberties in this country. Sound familiar?…

SINCE LATE JANUARY, LEADERS AT LIBERAL FOUNDATIONS AND donor networks have been preparing for a legal assault by federal agencies. That moment finally arrived in September, when, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche directed federal prosecutors to investigate the Open Society Foundations on a range of possible criminal charges, reportedly on orders from the White House. Two weeks earlier, Donald Trump had vowed to go after George Soros, the founder of OSF: “We’re going to look into Soros, because I think it’s a RICO case against him and other people,” Trump said on September 12, referring to the federal racketeering law. “Because this is more than, like, protests. This is real agitation.” No president has ever before singled out a private foundation or a…

AT 2:33 PM MOUNTAIN TIME, ON FEBRUARY 27, 2025, NATASHA MILES’S WORLD FELL APART. The 53-year-old had been driving west for five days. She was heading toward a new home and a new job after spending decades working at Penn State, where she’d earned her PhD in atmospheric science and had been a research professor in its Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science. In recent years, she had received grant money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for her projects and had also served as a consultant for the agency. Her contacts there had been encouraging her join NOAA full-time, and after grappling with the prospect of leaving academia, she had said yes. Miles was at a point in her life when she wanted to shake things up a…

THERE’S A SCENE IN LUCA GUADAGNINO’S CAMPUS MELO-drama After the Hunt in which a student, in a bid to meaningfully connect with her steely professor, issues a desperate plea: “Can we just stop being smart for, like, one fucking second?” The student is Maggie Resnick, played by the dependably charismatic Ayo Edebiri. She’s a struggling doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at Yale, and she puts her request to Alma Imhoff, brought to life by a striking Julia Roberts, over dinner. The pair are sitting in Alma’s elegant apartment, a tasteful space warmed by rich wood paneling, amber light sources, and distinctive sconces. The mood is tense, and that question—“Can we stop being smart for one second?”—hangs in the air. There is some ambiguity about its meaning. Is Maggie asking…

THE SUPREME COURT HEARD ORAL ARGUMENTS ON October 15 in Louisiana v. Callais, a case about whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prevents white people from overrepresenting themselves in Congress. The justices can sometimes sound like they’re deliberating great and technical points of law during oral arguments, but the outcome in this case was decided long before the lawyers arrived at the courthouse. The six Republican justices are going to neuter the Voting Rights Act and allow the dilution of the voting rights of Black Americans through racist gerrymandering. The hearing was largely an exercise by the Republicans in justifying their racist positions. At issue were maps for the congressional districts in Louisiana. The state has six of these districts. After the 2020 census, the state produced a…

AMID THE COUNTRY’S GENERAL COLLAPSE INTO fascist squalor, culture has struggled to keep up. Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today’s listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young’s tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry’s studious disregard of the way America lives now. A cultural scene reduced to elevating Jimmy Kimmel as a surrogate Dalton Trumbo is clearly running on fumes. This state of political inertia is probably most advanced in American fiction, where MAGA encounters are routinely transposed into domestic fables of…

4k Number of federal workers that the Trump administration attempted to lay off in October, during the government shutdown $14B Amount the shutdown will cost the US economy, according to the Congressional Budget Office 1.4 M Number of federal workers who aren’t getting paid 730K Number of federal workers who must continue to work without pay 42M Number of people who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, which is affected by the shutdown 26% Projected increase in the average price of health insurance next year in the Affordable Care Act marketplace without any intervention from Congress…

IT WAS A SUNDAY THIS PAST JUNE, AND VIRGINIA ORTEGA WAS HEADING to work at her job cleaning hotel rooms, putting in overtime so she could pay her rent. She asked her son Cesar (a pseudonym), an autistic 16-year-old who also suffers from hallucinations, if she should find someone to watch him while she worked, but he said no, he was old enough to stay home alone. When Ortega returned to her squat, triangle-roofed one-story house in southeastern Kansas City, Missouri, after work, the front door was hanging open and Cesar was nowhere to be found. Frantic, she asked her neighbors what had happened. One told her that the police had taken her son while she was at work. Ortega, who is originally from Mexico and speaks Mixtec and Spanish,…

Within 24 hours of arriving in San Miguel de Allende, Karen decided to permanently leave the United States and become one of the many recent US immigrants to Mexico. Four months before visiting the city, the 55-year-old had been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s January 20 executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Program. Karen, who asked me not to use her full name because of her current immigration status, says through a haze of tears, “It’s hard to explain the compound grief involved in seeing a sector that did nothing but good just destroyed,” adding that much of the program’s work involved rescuing victims of sexual exploitation. “The day that I got my notice, 3,000 of my colleagues around the world got their notice,” Karen says from…

RACISM HAS OFTEN ACCOMPANIED THE REPRESSION OF civil liberties. In the antebellum period, the defenders of slavery criminalized teaching the enslaved to read or write; banned the voicing of antislavery sentiment in colleges; prohibited the distribution of anti-slavery literature through the mails; and proscribed consideration of antislavery petitions in Congress. Militant foes of abolitionism destroyed presses and assassinated editors. A mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of The Liberator, through the streets of Boston, while another temporarily silenced abolitionism’s greatest orator, Frederick Douglass, who later remarked aptly that “slavery cannot tolerate free speech.” In the long, terrible period of racist reaction that followed Reconstruction, proponents of white supremacy continued to try to stifle anti-racist dissent. In 1892, in Memphis, they destroyed the press of the indomitable anti-lynching journalist Ida…

ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS ABOUT TO FIND OUT WHAT I learned the hard way: No one can be truly prepared for the tsunami-like dynamics of the transition from regular human to leader of a city of 8.5 million people. So let me speak from experience as a two-term mayor of New York City and offer a little guidance (or at least some solace) to Zohran and his team as they begin their extraordinary journey in governance. There are four areas that can make or break the first year of a mayoralty: Team, Simplicity, Speed, and Authenticity. Let me break them down. Team: When I started having focused conversations with Zohran earlier this year, I was struck by how deeply and thoughtfully he absorbed advice. He was consistently big-picture-oriented and historically grounded…

AS THE SEAT OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, WASHINGTON, DC, tends to experience whatever the United States as a whole is experiencing, but in sharper relief. Its health tells us a lot about the nation’s health—and right now, both are in crisis. For months, Washington has been forced to host unprecedented deployments of National Guard troops and ICE agents, with the former largely functioning to simulate the experience of military occupation while the latter raids homes and worksites and tramples on the basic civil liberties of immigrants and citizens alike. Washington isn’t the only city that’s under siege. The first major National Guard deployments, in June, were in Los Angeles, the home-town of Donald Trump’s homeland-security adviser Stephen Miller, for the specific purpose of confronting those who were protesting against ICE’s immigration…

There are few authors who have been famous for half their lives. Zadie Smith is one of those rare figures. When her debut novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000, it was met with critical praise, and Smith was ushered into the canon of British literature. Over the ensuing 25 years, she has demonstrated her creativity and versatility by publishing six novels, one collection of short stories, a play, a children’s book, and many essays. Like her other works of non-fiction, her new collection, Dead and Alive, explores the subtle details of art, the complexities of grief, and the political upheavals of our era. Although the book encompasses essays published between 2016 and 2025, taken together, they present cultural criticism and political commentary in a plummier tone than the murkiness…

ON A SUNNY TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN JULY, CAOILFHIONN GALLAGHER APPEARED BEFORE MEMBERS OF THE Senate Foreign Relations Committee wearing a “Free Jimmy Lai” pin on the lapel of her burgundy suit. She was in Washington to testify on the decline of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong. “That topic and the fate of one man are inextricably linked: my client, Jimmy Lai,” Gallagher said in her opening remarks. Lai, a 78-year-old businessman and publisher of a pro-democracy newspaper, has been held in solitary confinement in Hong Kong since late 2020. A British national, Lai has been on trial since late 2023 and faces life imprisonment for allegedly colluding with foreign forces as well as for sedition. The governments of multiple countries, including the United States, say the charges against…

OVER A YEAR AFTER DIRON KELLY FACED DOWN THE JUDGE AT HIS eviction hearing, he still remembered her question: “How did you get to court?” He could have told her about the company that bought Conrad at Concord Mills, the Charlotte, North Carolina, apartment complex where he lived, in March 2022—the one that Kelly says installed a slew of “gadgets” he didn’t need before raising his rent by nearly $400 a month. He could have told her about the eviction notices that the company kept filing against him—the ones that came, he says, with an onslaught of fees that virtually guaranteed he’d never fully get back on his feet. But in the eyes of the court, it didn’t matter: He owed money that he didn’t have. So he was thrown…

DEMOCRACY IS GETTING TO BE ONE OF those words that, at least in our day-to-day political debates, has become essentially meaningless: Because you can’t be against it (openly, at least), whatever you disapprove of must represent a profound betrayal of it. When Democrats are in power, Republicans think our democracy is imperiled; when Republicans are in power, Democrats do. Specific cases can be difficult to parse if you’re not using this which-side-are-you-on standard. If, for example, President Donald Trump, an elected official, wants to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, appointed by him and confirmed by the Senate, is that antidemocratic? Is gerrymandering, understood to mean the misuse of a state legislature’s power to draw legislative districts, antidemocratic in principle, or is it merely a correctable misuse of…

IN THAT CLASSIC OF WESTERN CINEMA, MONTY PYTHON’S Life of Brian, the title character addresses a crowd in Jerusalem that has mistaken him for Jesus Christ. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he pleads. “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!” The crowd chants back, in unison, “Yes, we’re all individuals!” “You’re all different!” Brian protests. “Yes, we’re all different!” the crowd responds (though one lone voice insists, “I’m not”). The scene illustrates as well as anything the problem of trying to write a history of that endlessly fascinating but endlessly slippery subject—the “self.” The self can be defined as the way people experience and understand their own individuality. The difficulty stems from the fact that the very…