Innehållsförteckning för January 2026 från The Nation

Democrats have developed an uncanny skill for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory in recent years. That didn’t happen, though, in the December 2 special election to fill a US House seat in Tennessee. While progressive Democrat Aftyn Behn fell short in her quest to flip a radically gerrymandered Republican district, she made up so much ground that smart Democrats have already begun to redo their calculations—and reconsider their strategies—regarding the midterm elections. If they reconsider those strategies boldly enough, they could seize a national victory in 2026 from the jaws of Behn’s narrow defeat in 2025. By dramatically expanding the map of House and Senate races in which they invest resources, by recognizing the need not just to run against Donald Trump but to run for something, and…

"THE SURVIVORS WON!” ANNOUNCED REPRESENTATIVE Ro Khanna (D-CA) after he and Thomas Massie (R-KY)—with a late assist from Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—secured a remarkable 427–1 vote in the House of Representatives for their Epstein Files Transparency Act. The November 18 vote was immediately followed by unanimous approval in the Senate, in a rare assertion of authority by an otherwise dismal 119th Congress. Yet instead of taking a victory lap, Khanna and Massie kept talking about what had been accomplished by the courageous survivors of the child-sex-trafficking abuses perpetrated by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and their elite associates. It is not often that members of Congress steer attention to others. But Khanna and Massie did just that. Long before the unlikely legislative partners made their bold…

AT LONG LAST, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S GRIP on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdäm-merung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Vice President JD Vance and edgelord podcaster Tucker Carlson seem to agree. Carlson is welcoming Fuentes and the groypers on board, while Vance refrains from criticizing them. He deplores “infighting” and tries…

Malice Aforethought I congratulate John Ganz for what is probably the best meditation on the Trump regime so far [“From the F-Word to the T-Word,” October 2025]. Denouncing “isms” is a trap. Accusing people with whom you disagree of being infected with an enemy ideology implies that a purge of minds, and perhaps bodies, is necessary. Ganz points to this dynamic but finds it “hollow,” when it is actually programmatic. This is exactly the threat that Trump and his supporters use to drive people into his followership. “Woke” is not an insult; it is an accusation of fanaticism. The “isms” are also easily defused. Trump can get enough minority and women followers to prove that his camp is not so prejudiced as his critics frantically insist it must be. In…

DONALD TRUMP HATES LOS ANGELES—AND FOR GOOD REASON. LOS ANGELES is a deep-blue city that regularly backs Democrats at every level of government. It is a strong union town in a nation where the labor movement is treading water. It is majority Black and brown, with whites representing only 28 percent of its nearly 4 million residents. And it must particularly gall this president, who has made his name by attacking immigrants, to have to acknowledge that almost 35 percent of the population of one of the wealthiest urban centers in the world came from a different country. The City of the Angels was one of the first of America’s sanctuary cities, and it remains defiantly proud of this status—refusing cooperation with the ICE and Border Patrol thugs that Trump…

THE ATACAMA DESERT IN CHILE IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND forbidding places on earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test-run Mars missions. Most years, the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground with delicate purple flowers that disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. It was a rare treat for locals used to grimmer ornamentation: Since 2001, colorful mountains of used clothing have been the main feature growing across the Atacama. By the time the largest mound was set on fire in 2022, a witness claimed, it contained some 100,000 tons of discarded fabric, roughly the weight of an aircraft carrier. Today, piles like it continue to…

JOHN D. NEGROPONTE, A CAREER DIPLOmat and national security official, is something of a Forrest Gump figure in the sordid annals of postwar American foreign policy. Having entered the Foreign Service in 1960, he joined the US delegation at the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 as an assistant to Henry Kissinger—where he apparently clashed with his boss over the latter’s insufficient commitment to continuing the Vietnam War. As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte helped cover up the operation of notorious right-wing death squads and played a key role in facilitating US support for the Nicaraguan contras. Later, he threw his weight behind the North American Free Trade Agreement as George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Mexico. And in 2005, he was appointed by Bush the younger as the…

There is always music to be written.After all, life is the sweat of Twinkie Clark,the product of music, the skilled controlof your organ despite the kinesis of memory.Like an X-ray, an audience will always focuson the white center. The barrier betweena bee and its honey stomach.Somewhere between allergy, elegy.Somewhere between cascade, casket,yet I live, the middle ground of gospeland gossip, wiping off sweat, smearing a kiss.My mother pronounces killed and kiltthe same way between wiping off sweatand smearing a kiss. You can be putin the ground for what comes outyour mouth. Today I searched under the pewsof my life for loose change. Tell me, congregation,did you give with the fullnessor the foolness of your heart?…

ABOVE ALL ELSE, GRIEF IS INTENSELY PERSONAL. WHERE hope is a thing with feathers, a flying, beautiful feeling we all recognize, grief is its opposite: a universal emotion that’s nonetheless mostly private and impossible to convey in its depths. Grief creates a gulf between you and other people. I find that ironic, given its universality. We’ll all lose someone or something foundational, but that certainty doesn’t make it any more legible. Though it does resonate; it does produce echoes in others. The impenetrability of grief is a theme that sits at the center of Blood Orange’s fifth and latest album, Essex Honey, which is more than anything a collection of laments. Dev Hynes (the artist behind the pseudonym) is often serious and often wistful—see his albums Negro Swan and Cupid…

The cop30 climate conference concluded on November 22 with a disappointing—even infuriating—agreement. In a diplomatic black eye for the host country, Brazil, what had been promoted as a summit of “truth” and “implementation” delivered little of either. At a time when climate change is already imposing terrible suffering, when emissions are still increasing, and when 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want governments to take stronger action, COP30 left the climate fight standing still, if not sliding backward. Money—who has it and who needs it—has been the sticking point at virtually every UN climate conference since such negotiations began at the 1992 Earth Summit, and it remained so at COP30. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots were as stark as ever, as was the power of fossil-fuel…

COURTS PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN AUTHORITARIAN regimes. They legitimize the actions of despots by declaring them “legal” or “constitutional.” They ensure institutional compliance with the regime’s rules. And they make politically unpopular decisions that align with the authoritarian’s goals while giving the authoritarian political distance from those goals. Quite simply, you can’t instigate a strongman takeover of a constitutional democracy without having a robust judicial power that’s willing to play along. In the United States, Donald Trump’s regime has found its willing wingman in Chief Justice John Roberts and the other Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Roberts court is game to do everything Trump wants it to do and, as an added bonus, to do most of it in secret, under cover of what’s known as the shadow…

Yes! DAVID LANDES CELL PHONES ARE TO BLAME FOR THE youth loneliness crisis—but not in the way you might think. We can’t fault cell phones alone; they are tied up with too many social phenomena for that. But they are emblematic of a way of life—one isolated yet always connected—that so many of us want to escape. Cell phones are portals to monetized digital worlds that depend and feed on loneliness. Teasing out their roles in these complex social dynamics can help us understand how to confront the youth loneliness crisis. The prehistory of cell phones provides clues on where to begin. The solitary individual in mass industrial society has long been a research subject of academics and a theme in pop culture. David Riesman’s 1950 sociological study The Lonely…

In recent months, as the Trump administration has grown frustrated by the pace of deportations organized by ICE, it has sicced the even nastier Border Patrol on American cities—first Los Angeles, then Chicago, and now Charlotte. The move is the vicious culmination of a decades-long trend of hyper-militarized immigration enforcement. In 1994, The Nation published “The Border Patrol State,” an essay by the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko about the increased presence of the Border Patrol far from the actual border. Silko grew up on a reservation and knew how the US government had mistreated Native peoples. Even so, this didn’t change the “wonderful sense of absolute freedom” she felt as she “cruised down the open road and across the vast desert plateaus.” That sense of freedom was destroyed,…

CALAMITY HAS DOGGED THE POLITICAL CAREER OF Karen Bass since her years in the California State Assembly. In 2008, she became the first Black woman to head the Assembly—or, indeed, the legislature of any state. But no sooner had she taken up the gavel than she was thrown into a budget standoff with then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the nation’s worst recession in decades threatened California, the world’s fourth-largest economy. Bass went on to represent her congressional district in Los Angeles, often winning with more than 85 percent of the vote, but her election to the House in 2010 coincided with the peak of the Tea Party backlash. And after she was elected as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus during the early days of Trump’s first term, Covid struck. Making…

PUFFER JACKET Quilted jackets stuffed with down—generally goose feathers—have been standard-issue for the last century. But polyester fill has begun to dominate the market, and manufacturers have relied on a toxic group of chemicals known as PFAS to waterproof the jackets. These forever chemicals don’t degrade naturally, and they have infiltrated drinking water, farmland, and the human body. Down carries its own baggage: It often involves plucking feathers from birds while they’re still alive. NEW DENIM JEANS Denim jeans, traditionally made mostly of cotton, carry many of the same environmental burdens as the cotton T-shirt (see facing page). In recent years, elastic textures made from synthetic blends have added microplastics to the denim equation. Washing a single pair of jeans can release up to 56k microfibers into waste-water systems, and…

AS A WANDERING FREELANCE REPORTER IN WEST AFRICA at the end of the 1970s, I followed the lurid spectacle of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a former sergeant major in France’s African colonial army. A veteran with the Free French Forces during the liberation of France from German occupation in 1945, Bokassa returned home to his native Central Africa shortly afterward and rose with irresistible swiftness after it achieved independence in 1960. By 1964, he was the commander in chief of his country’s 500-man army and its first colonel. Two years later, he overthrew the Central African Republic’s civilian president and embarked on a long period of erratic and power-hungry rule. This culminated in Bokassa’s selfproclamation as the country’s president for life, and then even more grandiosely in 1977 as imperial majesty of…

THE $300 MILLION BALLROOM THAT FORMER REAL ESTATE developer and current president Donald Trump is building where the East Wing of the White House once stood is many things. The 90,000-square-foot room is a perfect expression of Trump’s unfailingly plutocratic worldview. It is a flex of his tragically warped idea of strength, and most of all it is a convenient way for gutless corporate CEOs to pay tribute: Donors to the ballroom con-struction fund include casino mogul Miriam Adelson’s Family Foundation, Amazon, the cameras, it’s just a box. You might think Apple, Altria Group (formerly known as Philip Morris)… and those are just the A’s. The ballroom is many things, but it is not exactly a work of architecture. Yes, it has an architect, a man named James McCrery, and…

THE US BORDER PATROL GAVE CITY LEADERS IN Charlotte, North Carolina, just two days’ notice before unleashing “Operation Charlotte’s Web” on November 15, the latest stop in President Trump’s immigration-crackdown road show targeting Democratic cities. Secrecy and confusion seemed to be core to its plan. After the crackdown spread to Durham and Raleigh, the mayors of both cities said they had no idea agents were coming. And Democratic Governor Josh Stein wrote to the Department of Homeland Security a week into the raids to declare that, “despite requesting information from the federal government, state officials have received no notice of planned immigration enforcement actions since these operations began.” North Carolinians may have been largely kept in the dark about the immigration-enforcement operations, but Siembra NC, a Latino group founded in…

ON NOVEMBER 18, DONALD TRUMP SUFFERED A MAJOR political defeat when the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a nearly unanimous vote: 427–1. But while emphatic, the House measure included a significant proviso that might yet prevent a full reckoning with Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Trump had fought for months against the bill, which was drafted by a bipartisan coalition created by California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie. In the end, the strong public revulsion for Epstein’s crimes made opposing the bill untenable. But the final version specified that the Department of Justice must make public “all unclassified” documents on Epstein. The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to…

Back in the 1980s, a long-haired word maven found his way to The Nation and promptly offered his skills in the journalistic fight against Reaganism. He hailed from the mountains of West Virginia and called himself Sandy. As his colleagues would quickly learn, he was brilliant and utterly himself—an autodidact with a mind for crosswords, a love of French, and a knack for the twisty rules of English grammar. To this day, he works his magic on the magazine’s website, copy-editing our errors out of existence and saving us from our worst, ungrammatical instincts. Now Sandy is about to celebrate a milestone. A birthday. And what better way to honor our resident word wizard than with his very own puzzle? All hail Sandy! ©2025 Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto/Out of…

The New York Nation, as some called this magazine in its early years, has always kept one eye on Los Angeles. Even if the magazine suggested in an 1869 essay on “The New West” that “not everything is lovely there,” our writers have over the past century and a half been drawn to the sprawling city—with all its energy and possibility, along with its share of sordid realities and inequalities—and the broader story of what would come to be known as the Left Coast. We return again with this issue, which features a multifaceted examination of LA’s bold resistance to the Trump administration’s assault on the city itself, and on the rich diversity and democratic promise that Los Angeles represents. Bill Gallegos, a veteran Chicano activist who is a member…

A year that began with the second inauguration of Donald Trump was always going to be suspect. But 2025 became overwhelming. The president’s cruelty and lawlessness, along with his aggressive determination to deconstruct both government and civil society, shocked Americans, whom polls now suggest are deeply dissatisfied with his reckless tenure. This year’s Nation Honor Roll recognizes activists and artists, pastors, and political leaders who have spoken truth to Trump’s destructive power and forged a resistance that is evident in mass demonstrations and election results—and in an emerging hope, as Patti Smith once counseled, “That the people have the power/To redeem the work of fools.” John Nichols PROPHETIC VOICE Mariann Budde After a reinauguration day that saw him fêted by billionaires and right-wing ideologues who hailed the supposed triumph of…

CLASSIC COTTON TEE Growing, weaving, dyeing, and manufacturing cotton into a T-shirt can require more than 700 gallons of water—enough for a single person to drink for 900 days. Cotton cultivation also requires heavy chemical use; some estimates indicate the crop accounts for roughly 16% of all insecticides sold worldwide. EXERCISE LEGGINGS Most exercise leggings are synthetic, generally made up of roughly 85% polyester and 15 percent Lycra (commonly known as spandex). This means they’re a fossil-fuel product and will shed microplastics when washed or worn. RUNNING SHOES A single running shoe contains as many as 65 discrete parts that require 360 processing steps to assemble, which is often done using coal-powered machines. On average, making a pair of shoes emits the equivalent of 30 pounds of carbon dioxide, over two-thirds…

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A BRIGHT SPOT IN TODAY’S POlitical and social gloom, the union idea seems to be it. Organized labor has rarely been more popular: Gallup reports that 68 percent of Americans “approve” of labor unions, while another poll found that almost 90 percent of people under the age of 30 view unions favorably. Just two years ago, the power of these statistics was put to the test with a series of attention-grabbing strikes and wage increases among teamsters, autoworkers, academic workers, and Hollywood writers and actors. At coffee shops, warehouses, and retail stores, and among cultural workers, nurses, and interns, organizing drives have revived the “labor beat,” generating headlines, podcasts, and books celebrating the ambitions of so many “essential workers” during 72 the pandemic years and after.…

We’ve traveled to a field with its innerservings of sand and wolves. The sand is owned and never appears on a map because the owners want its hardtender invisible. The space trembles and is built up and seems eliminated. It has come to rest and I am in a hurryto listen. Nothing might be more fragile than smearing infinity aroundand waiting dutiful centuries. Sun hovers every high and low, posing and pointing as necessity.Eros I once believed could make me an incredible promise. Sincere, I took it. Of course Ialso learned no love loves a stain. In confidence, we discussed it. Previously. We hidunattended until finally our settlement of us decided to stay. To clarify, to celebrate we canopyin the desert where the sun singing sand on a loop becomes…