Innholdsfortegnelse for July 24/31, 2023 i The Nation

IT HAS BEEN A LONG GOODBYE. THE SUPREME COURT’S DECISION TO OVERTURN the constitutional right to affirmative action in college admissions achieved a long-standing conservative policy goal through the fiat of six unelected justices. But affirmative action wasn’t just killed by Republican lawyers. It was made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into that “elite” school they wanted. Some of the most racist claptrap I’ve had aimed at me had to do with affirmative action. It’s used by a certain kind of underachieving white person as an excuse to denigrate any Black person’s credentials. Then those same people use their own racial…

ALMOST A YEAR TO THE DAY AFTER THE SUPREME Court ended the legal right to abortion nation-wide, one of the main architects of the strategy behind the decision stood at a podium in a Pittsburgh airport hotel. James Bopp Jr. had worked toward the defeat of Roe v. Wade as general counsel for the nation’s largest anti-abortion group, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), since 1978. Nearly half a century later, he still serves in that role. Now Bopp, dressed in a salmon-pink polo shirt and a blazer, was about to admit that his life’s work wasn’t panning out the way he’d planned. The Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had been “a monumental event that required enormous effort,” Bopp said during…

AS HE PREPARED FOR HIS SECOND CRIMINAL ARRAIGNMENT of 2023, Donald Trump duly loaded up his Truth Social account with all-caps messages to his followers bemoaning his legal martyrdom at the hands of a corrupt and thuggish Biden Justice Department. Most of those exhortations, though, felt phoned in. Perhaps Trump was all too aware that he’d only reached the midpoint in his pending series of legal crucibles and needed to conserve his sloganeering energy. While he’s now been arraigned in Manhattan and Miami, he’s facing a likely indictment in Fulton County, Ga., this August as well as in another federal case, both stemming from his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election and reassume the presidency via a coup. Whatever the reason, Trump was left barking out semaphoric…

SO’ED OD, A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL, IS ONE OF AROUND 1,000 Palestinian residents of the eight villages in Masafer Yatta—a small region of rugged hills at the southern edge of the occupied West Bank. So’ed now spends her days helping her mother look after their flock of sheep and make cheese in the small village of Sfay, whose name comes from the Arabic word for “pure.” So’ed stopped attending class after Israeli bulldozers crushed the village school. That day, So’ed told us, she helped young children, the students of lower grades, to escape through the windows. “We were in English class,” she said. “I saw a Jeep approaching through the window. The teacher stopped the class. Soldiers arrived with two bulldozers. They closed the doors on us. We were stuck in…

THE BLACK FIGURE IS CURRENTLY IN A sustained spotlight. For some time now, curators, scholars, and critics have wrestled with the representation of people of African descent in art, grappling with the interpretive problems and possibilities presented by subjects who were once objects, cargo, and commodities. The rise of a Black figurative turn in contemporary art reflects this interest. In the past six years, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, and Toyin Ojih Odutola—all of whom have made Black figures their central subject—have each had a solo exhibition at a major museum. Galleries, too, have capitalized on the Black figure’s new presence in the public eye. Business has been particularly brisk among art institutions seeking to remediate the relentless whiteness of their holdings. And many museums have followed suit,…

SOON AFTER THE NEWS BROKE, A RUSSIAN FRIEND e-mailed me, “What I’m most concerned about is Russia in chaos with nukes, and someone worse than Putin coming to power.” The endgame remains murky, but the (barely) two days that rocked Russia posed the most serious challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s authority in his 23 years in power. Yet however weakened, he’s still in power, and Ukraine’s counter-offensive is, by many accounts, a slow slog through minefields and trenches. The time line is well-known. Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched a “march of justice” following allegations that Russia’s army had attacked a Wagner encampment. Prigozhin’s forces sliced through Russia’s south to Rostov-on-Don, heading toward Moscow. With his private army (largely recruited from the country’s prisons), and his furious…

WHOSE PENIS IS BIG ENOUGH TO BE PRESIDENT? That’s the high-stakes issue animating the Republican primary right now, with former president Donald Trump’s advisers urging him to challenge Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to a literal dick-measuring contest. According to Rolling Stone, they want Trump to call DeSantis “Tiny D” for the clever double entendre of it all: “He’s also short but…yes of course it’s about his penis, that’s why we’re doing it,” one Trump team member said. Trump already previewed this strategy in 2016 against “Little Marco” Rubio, who then zinged Trump’s suspiciously small hands (we all know what that means), prompting him to reassure the public on a national debate stage about the size of his manhood: “I guarantee you, there’s no problem. I guarantee.” It’s been a steady…

Introducing Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal, a new podcast featuring the latest musings from the brilliant legal mind of The Nation’s favorite justice correspondent. The nine unelected and unaccountable politicians on the Supreme Court comprise the least democratic and yet most powerful policy-making institution in the United States. In six weekly installments, Elie will showcase his singular blend of wisecracks, wisdom, and legal expertise to address six problems with the court and six ways to fix it. New episodes air every Tuesday; subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit TheNation.com/Contempt.…

CORNEL WEST IS A VERY SERIOUS MAN. An intellectual superstar from the moment he graduated from Harvard (where he majored in Near Eastern languages and civilization), West was the first African American to be awarded a PhD in philosophy at Princeton. Though he wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Ethics, Historicism and the Marxist Tradition,” West also came under the influence of Richard Rorty and the American pragmatist revival during his time at Princeton. He has since taught at Yale (where he held a joint appointment with the college and the Divinity School), Harvard (where he taught in both the Department of African and African American Studies and the Divinity School, and was named a University Professor), Princeton (where he helped found the Center for African-American Studies), and the Union Theological…

WE ALL LIVE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH, BUT THE gloom of mortality envelops some lives with a special darkness. President Joe Biden, the pillar of the Democratic Party establishment, is the polar opposite in most ways of his unconventional primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yet the two men share a bond of grief. In 1972, just weeks after his upset win in the US Senate race in Delaware, Biden lost his first wife and infant daughter in a car accident. In 2015, while serving as vice president, he had to bear an excruciating witness to the brain cancer that consumed his eldest son, Beau. In 1963, when Kennedy was 9, his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. In 1968, when he was 14, his father and namesake,…

Yes! KEIR MILBURN MOST CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENTS on the left about the usefulness of generational analysis are really disagreements about the functioning of class politics. Generational analysis can’t be reduced to class, but in conjunctures such as ours, it can add a useful temporal dimension to our understanding of class divisions. The point of identifying divisions within the working class is, of course, not to exacerbate them but to understand their causes, so that we can better strategize how to overcome them. Generational analysis provides clues to the operation of class today, because generational political divisions have arisen out of the key structural crises and trends of our times: climate change, secular stagnation, the drawn-out collapse of the neoliberal consensus, and an aging population in the wealthy nations. Although these crises…

San Francisco THE HEADQUARTERS OF URBAN ALCHEMY IS ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF A LUXURY building between a shuttered Whole Foods and a Supreme store near the city’s Tenderloin district. Its windows display a decal with one of the nonprofit’s catch-phrases: “Once you see us, you can’t unsee us.” UA “practitioners” or “ambassadors” guard corners and patrol Market Street, respond to emergency calls relating to homelessness, and monitor tent encampments and shelters. Some wear sunglasses and balaclavas with their uniform: a camouflage jacket emblazoned on the back with the group’s all-seeing-eye logo. That eye, according to UA, represents the “inner wisdom” and “powerful spirit” that every UA practitioner “must be armed with” to survive the “dark places” that they enter doing their work. UA promises to treat people with compassion,…

Now there are mini-moons, I read,primordial crumbs. Or ratherthere always were but now our instrumentsare sensitive enough to register. It probably means I’m dead. Or dying.How I spend all day staring into a screen,or typing, or reloading. Not a mirror, not a window,a screen I hold in my hand, endlessly reach for, sleep next to. Photogenic instead ofpoetogenic: I like to thinkthe poem’s resistance to be about youis poetry’s critique of you and of how I cling to youas though you were the world.…

We think we let the world in—how oxidation slowly turns the avocadodimple by lovely dimplefrom green to brown to black; O oxygenhow you react to polyphenols, howenzymes love us too much, too wantingwringing with desire, slick & wet & biochemicalso we must breathe in the soot & we mustexhale our own toxins; the way of any livingthing is to live, they say; what if all the theysare wrong? what if the living never cameeasy in the first place? what if I keepremoving pieces of you: shuck of appendix,shuck of gallbladder, shuck of knee, now,shuck of breast, shuck of nodes? cenotesof us: carved from our tissues, our fluid-filled ____;where we must & always swim—but we were wrong.We world, wholly; planet of flesh, ripening.Let wind, let sun consume; fruit of usto elements;…