The Nation October 14, 2019

Unrecognized Labor Many thanks for Melissa Range’s fine poem “The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1838)” [September 30]. The powerful book that was born from the sisters’ work, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké’s husband, is generally credited as the author (though the book was published without any authors listed) because he was the head of publications at the society at the time. However, the book was really coedited by Angelina Grimké Weld, her sister Sarah Grimké, and Theodore Weld. While he shaped the structure of the book, internal evidence suggests that Grimké Weld wrote the introduction. And when the sisters clipped the articles, notices,…

In August 2018 a photographer snapped a shot of a girl sitting alone outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Next to her lay a sign in Swedish that said, “School strike for climate.” The girl skipped school for three weeks and each Friday after that, heading to Parliament and handing out leaflets that read, “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” Greta Thunberg is no longer striking alone. The climate activist, now 16 years old, was joined on September 20 by millions of others in a wave of strikes that rippled through cities and towns around the world. Enormous crowds marched and sang and chanted through the streets of Jakarta and Johannesburg, Warsaw and Brisbane, Athens and San Salvador, led mostly by kids and teenagers.…

For the past several months—and the past three Democratic presidential debates—the party’s two progressive standard-​ bearers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have been making love, not war. As Warren told Anderson Cooper in the first debate, “Bernie and I have been friends forever.” During the second debate, with both of them on the stage the same night, Warren made a point about the disastrous effects of US trade policy—and Sanders chimed in, saying, “Elizabeth is absolutely right.” When Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney attacked Warren on security policy, Sanders tweeted in the Massachusetts senator’s defense, while Warren has resolutely refused repeated media entreaties to disavow her support for Medicare for All, the Vermont senator’s signature initiative. This absence of infighting on the left—or at least between these two left candidates, since…

Fishing, Gone? 126 Pounds that a Chinook salmon, Alaska’s state fish, can weigh $595M Estimated value of Alaska’s commercial salmon harvest in 2018 $3.3B Average annual export value of Alaska’s seafood 55°F Warmest water temperature a salmon can handle before its health starts to decline 81.7°F Water temperature recorded in July in the Deshka River, a major salmon stream north of Anchorage 1M Number of pink salmon in the Shaktoolik River threatened by warming waters…

Dear Liza, I am the editor of an alumni magazine that is sent to a diverse alumni population. I strive to be inclusive in my coverage and usually succeed. A recent issue did not contain any African Americans except in the athletics section, and an African American faculty member complained to me about it, ignoring the many editions that show excellent diversity. I feel it is my job to go where the story is first and worry about diversity second. To me, her criticism that the African American athletes we featured were stereotypical discounts the very real accomplishments of these students. She believes in representation in every issue in what she considers an acceptable way. How would you respond to this complaint and this instruction? —Flummoxed Dear Flummoxed, It is…

The most basic question that the Trump presidency raises is: How the hell did this happen? There is, obviously, no single answer for why this particular miscreant became president of the United States. Were it not for the Russians or WikiLeaks or James Comey, etc., etc., we might still resemble a normal nation. But these isolated explanations do not speak to the larger question of how this jerk got anywhere near the White House in the first place. In the past few months, three authors have sought to address that larger question, and with them, we can begin to see an outline of how the GOP allowed itself to be taken over by people with only a tenuous grasp of reality. In his book American Carnage, Tim Alberta, a former…