Innholdsfortegnelse for February 24, 2020 i The Nation

Competing Theories In “No Going Back” [February 3], Gabriel Winant’s essay on my book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, Winant dismisses the anti-monopoly tradition as a keystone of the New Deal. Unfortunately, to make his case, he relies on mischaracterizations. Winant’s central critique is that I frame “antitrust activists in the New Deal as the entirety of that project’s egalitarian thrust.” Not so. From veteran marches to rural electrification, Social Security, fiscal policy, and unionizing Alcoa, I point out many different actors and tools central to the New Deal project. He claims I neglect the role of class and labor, leading me to wonder whether he read the section titled “A Worker Democracy” or the many references to labor. Or perhaps he skimmed over lines such…

Last month, two major physicians’ groups dealt a one-two punch in the fight for Medicare for All. On January 20, the 159,000-member American College of Physicians released a position paper arguing that a single-payer system or one with a robust public option would improve patient care and reduce costs. The next day, more than 2,000 doctors organized through Physicians for a National Health Program published a full-page letter in The New York Times prescribing Medicare for All for the nation. Together, the actions signal the increasing militancy of doctors who no longer feel represented by the largest professional society in their field, the American Medical Association. Since its rise in the early 20th century, the AMA has served as the most powerful umbrella organization for physician advocacy and lobbying and…

Recently, I got some blowback on a feminist listserv when I said I was thinking of writing about “Latinx,” the new gender-neutral replacement for “Latino” and “Latina.” Why was I, a non-Latinx, writing about it? Never mind that no one, including myself, knew what I would say, or that “Latinx” is an English word and that as an English-speaking person, I have a certain stake in its usage. The same goes for other “x” words—“Mx.” as a genderless honorific, “womxn,” and yes, “alumnx”—to say nothing of “they” as a singular pronoun. Still, the discussion reminded me that there is a rich conversation already going on about “Latinx” that I was ill prepared to take part in without more research and interviewing. So I’m staying in my lane. Let’s talk about…

South Dakota’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill on January 29 that would criminalize medical care for trans youth, making it a felony for doctors to provide hormones, puberty blockers, or surgery for anyone under the age of 16. A study published in February in Pediatrics found that those who wanted and received puberty blockers were less likely to have a history of suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts by their mid-30s. As Quincy Parke, a 17-year-old trans student, told the South Dakota House, “As someone who researched my own treatment options and someone who this bill would directly affect, what you’re doing is not preventing harm. You are actively denying medical treatment to children who have such strong feelings of disconnect from their bodies that over half of them…

On June 22, 1948, a refitted German troopship that had once borne Nazi soldiers and Jews fated for the concentration camps landed outside London with an entirely different set of passengers. Aboard the Empire Windrush were hundreds of migrants from the West Indies who paid reduced fares, in response to ads from British employers looking for laborers abroad. During a now famous interview from the ship’s deck, a newsreel reporter prompted one passenger, Aldwyn Roberts, better known to history as the calypsonian Lord Kitchener, to sing a song he had composed in transit. “London is the place for me,” he crooned as the cameras rolled. “I am glad to know my mother country.” The ship carried the first large group of West Indians to migrate to Britain, and Lord Kitchener’s…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…

187 Countries (out of 195 total) that agreed to regulate the movement of plastic waste in 2019 under the Basel Convention; the United States declined to ratify the treaty 150 Containers of plastic waste (totaling 4,119 tons) that Malaysia repatriated to 13 mostly rich countries 100M Estimated tons of plastic in the world’s oceans 12% Percentage of the world’s municipal solid waste that comes from the US, which has only 4 percent of the world’s population 6x Quantity of plastic waste burned in the US versus recycled 35.4M Tons of plastic waste generated by the US in 2017…

The latest podcast from writer and activist Mia Birdsong and The Nation examines how a guaranteed income could transform people’s lives. Birdsong first encountered the idea of a guaranteed income in the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. dating back to 1967. In them, King argued that if we provided everyone with a basic level of material security, all Americans could flourish. At first, Birdsong says, she thought this sounded ridiculous. As she notes in episode 1, “Free money went against everything I’d learned about being a respectable citizen. But people change, and our ideas evolve. I no longer think guaranteed income is absurd.” More Than Enough is a four-episode series that explores the concept of a guaranteed income through discussions with experts as well as with people who experience…

South Bend, Ind I WAS BORN IN THIS STATE AND HAVE A HORROR OF ITS SMALL CITIES. INDIANAPOLIS—MY HOME-town, where my family is buried and where some of my best friends still live—was bad enough. I have not been back in a while. But I spent the icy Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in South Bend, talking to black people about former mayor Pete Buttigieg and his presidential campaign’s difficulties with black voters, and his efforts to rectify the situation. We come to where the East Race is reunited with the main course of the St. Joseph River. Here, the river is a rebellious churn of swirls and eddies, in a hurry to get somewhere. Trotting up a flight of concrete stairs, we pick up the East Bank Trail,…

It came to me to sell the family farm,shift its failures to a man who planned to occupy the place for recreation,to hunt the deer that spook and shadow in the pines, my job to consign to another my granddad’s stunted groveof walnuts planted—against the forester’s advice— with his hired man Tiny, who diedby stepping in front of a train, though first he roped his dog Bear to a nearby tree, stapling a notethat read “Take Care Off Me.” Does anyone remember this fat fact—a loaf of toast and a dozen eggswas Tiny’s daily breakfast meal? Give it to me. I’ll remember that bit too. I fishedthat muddy pond just once, its manurey slurry, slipped downstreamfrom the Tulius brothers’ hogs, shot the one buck trophied on my wallwhose crippled hoof…

The Republican Party has acquitted President Donald Trump. That result was always the most likely outcome of the impeachment process. The inability of even 20 Republican senators to break free from the cult of Trump was widely assumed. But it didn’t have to go down like this. In their desire to appease a president all of them know to be a serial malefactor, Republicans adopted wild and discredited legal theories of executive power and privilege. To acquit a president, they crowned a king. We should not be shocked that they’ve done this. Republicans feel empowered to free the president from all constraints because they never intend to be subjected to a Democratic president armed with these new powers. Republicans think they’re on the cusp of locking in one-party control of…

In June 1980, two free-spirited young women—Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19—were on their way to the Rainbow Gathering, a hippie festival convening that year at the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, when they were shot and killed while hitchhiking in nearby Pocahontas County. If Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl were a traditional true-crime narrative, the story of their deaths and the search for their killer or killers would be the engine that drives the book. But Eisenberg is up to something more complex and harder to pin down. The Third Rainbow Girl is part of a wave of books upending true-crime tropes and pushing at the boundaries of the genre. If this is a book about murder, it is also a book about the history…

The most tedious cliché in political writing comes from W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming”: “The centre cannot hold.” Yeats was anticipating the apocalypse, but it has become a convenient shorthand to describe any deviation from business as usual. According to The New York Times, the poem “was quoted more in 2016 than in any other year in three decades.” The reasons for the resurgence are obvious. The election of Donald Trump made it difficult to be certain where the center even was or had been after eight years of ostensible ideological stability. As the 2020 Democratic primaries commence, the center is in question once again. The party appears fundamentally split. As New York’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, told New York magazine, “In…

Bow, N.H., September 28, 2019 ON A BRIGHT, SWEATY SATURDAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER, A GROUP OF ABOUT 50 DETERMINED PEOPLE marched down freight tracks toward the mountain of coal that rises at the rear of Merrimack Station, the last big coal-fired power plant in New England. Dressed in white hazmat suits and singing and drumming on large white buckets—and with dozens more stationed behind them at the plant’s front gate and several hundred supporters assembled at the ball field across the street—they intended to shovel coal from that toxic mountain into those buckets, removing fuel from the fire of climate catastrophe, literally and symbolically. This reporter was among them. I wore Tyvek and carried a bucket in my hand. Earlier, on August 17, in what the organizers called a signal…

Picture this: my heart as thick orange as mantecaas we turn on Twister for what has to bethe sixteenth time since 1996, and my parents are tired of it now,but I really begged for it,for the sake of tradition; Helen and Bill embarrassingly in love,the wind turning in circleslike the witch is at it again: the Phillip Seymour Hoffman witch, with hairlike herbicide wheat fields,and a ceremonious voice that slices right through metal.When we have enchiladas for dinner,I can’t help it— I have two, then three,then four and a half servingswith rice and even the beans swimming in their curls of gelatinous baconand comino; each piece hangs in the stewlike a comma. Like a coconut, dad says of my eating habits, but I had to save roomfor cheese, piled high…

ACROSS 1 Mystery, primarily to a scoundrel: “Am I a nut?” (9) 6 Tailless dog seen east of Georgia range (5) 9 Shocking nude art, like some films (7) 10 Troop buildup involving a couple of planes and heavy expenditure (7) 11 Messy, like a fox eating honey and a piece of nectarine (8) 12 Beware the nurse in a dark space (6) 14 Refuse to accept study? Yes (4) 15 Rob hid strange application in an aviary (9) 17 Feature a pair of attorneys have in neighborhood where many immigrants live (9) 19 Take back kilo in a safe place? (4) 21 Lives on bananas, etc., after first bite of banana split (6) 22 Wealth from nothing? Vice president admits unusual start and finish (8) 24 Salamander can start…