Innholdsfortegnelse for October 30/November 6, 2023 i The Nation

ON OCTOBER 3, DEMOCRATS GLEEFULLY JOINED EIGHT DISSIDENT REPUBLICANS TO bounce Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. That made sense: McCarthy was an inept, untrustworthy leader who couldn’t be counted on to keep his word to his own caucus, let alone the opposition, and Democrats were under no obligation to save him. But McCarthy’s exit could also give Democrats an edge in their quest to retake the House in 2024. While he was an incompetent House speaker, McCarthy knew something about securing GOP control. In 2022, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and suffered setbacks in statehouse races, McCarthy’s multiyear focus on candidate recruitment, fundraising, and targeted spending paid off in a narrow 222–213 GOP majority. And as a leader who was clearly more interested in elections than…

THE REACTIONARY RIGHT HAS FOUND AN IMPRESSIVE new target in its ongoing culture war. This time it’s Taylor Swift, whose current Eras Tour—encompassing 146 dates on five continents—is a cultural and economic earthquake so large that it has even registered on the sensitive fiscal seismographs of the Federal Reserve. In July, the Philadelphia Fed, in its authoritative Beige Book, credited Smith with reviving that city’s flagging tourism industry. As Time reports, Swift’s tour is projected to gross a record-breaking $2.2 billion and generate nearly $5 billion in consumer spending in the United States. Swift released her first album in 2006, before she turned 17. At 33, she’s become a media juggernaut comparable to Elvis in the 1950s, the Beatles in the ’60s, or Michael Jackson in the ’80s. And like…

17 Number of years Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving speaker of the House, held the office 0.74 Number of years Kevin McCarthy, the third-shortest-serving speaker, held the office 8 Number of Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy after he joined with Democrats to avert a government shutdown 3 Number of hours to spare when Congress passed a funding bill to avert a shutdown 6.1M Number of federal workers who could be furloughed or asked to work without pay during a shutdown 0 Number of congress-people who could be furloughed or asked to work without pay during a shutdown…

JORY SMITH WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FREE. HIS SENTENCE HAD BEEN UP for five days on August 28, 2020, when officers at Marcy Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in upstate New York where Smith had spent almost five years, summoned him to a conference room. But instead of releasing him, they said they were taking him to another prison. Confused, Smith asked where and why. Prison staff wouldn’t say, and they “threatened to ‘lose his property’ if he asked again,” Smith alleged in a legal complaint. A three-hour drive later, Smith found himself at Fishkill Correctional Facility in the Hudson Valley, where officers booked him, processed him, and sent him to a general population unit. He’s still there, three years after his latest possible release date. “I have not been…

SOME WORDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS, Raymond Williams once observed; they carry more of our common life, and therefore their meanings are denser and more complex. But a paradox ensues: The words we find most indispensable are also the ones we find hardest to define. “Data” today is one of those words. You could go to the dictionary, but that wouldn’t get you very far. To say that data is information, typically in digital form, says nothing about the strength or the strangeness of the psychic investments summoned by those four letters. We talk about data the way the 19th-century bourgeois often talked about culture: There is an airplane hangar’s worth of symbolic meanings evoked every time we utter the term. then using statistical techniques to analyze them, we…

AFTER WAKING UP EARLY SATURDAY TO SIRENS AND a barrage of hundreds of rockets, we learned about the unprecedented assault that Palestinian militants from Gaza carried out on Israeli towns near the border. More than 1,000 Israelis were massacred—many in their homes and many others at a music festival—and more than 150 others were abducted and taken to Gaza. Not since 1948 has Israel faced such an invasion, with entire villages overrun and communities decimated. As the hours passed, and Israeli ground forces made confused, chaotic attempts to regain control of the towns seized by Hamas, the Israeli military launched air strikes, which have killed more than 765 Palestinians as of this writing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to inflict a level of pain on Gaza that “our enemies…

I’M GOING TO TURN 30 NEXT MONTH, AND I WOULD really, really like to buy a house. I’m using “house” here as a catch-all for classic detached houses, duplexes, town houses, condos, and co-ops—basically any form of single-family residential architecture. US homeownership rates may have varied over time and across locales and demographics, but the idea of homeownership as the ne plus ultra of life goals is an indispensable part of the American dream. That dream has always been unavailable to many, especially America’s poor and racialized populations. In recent years, however, homeownership has become unavailable to more people than ever before, including white-collar workers and even members of the managerial classes. Hence, the very idea of homeownership as a practice has become more and more subject to criticism and…

There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the US economy. While the inflation rate remains higher than before the pandemic, it has fallen during the past six months as supply chains have normalized and the broader economy has worked itself through the chaos of reopening. This occurred even as unemployment remained low—within the mid–3 percent range. Many economists said this would be nearly impossible. We are not out of danger yet. Creeping energy prices and the resumption of student-loan payments could drive down growth. But a wave of productive investments unleashed by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act may be enough to counteract those negative forces. Journalists have largely ignored one crucial aspect of this recovery: the expansion of labor force participation. The increase in the number of people working…

Siem Reap, Cambodia BEFORE I SIGNED THE WAIVER, SOPHIE SCHILLINGS WENT OVER THE rules. “Please don’t run in the minefield,” she said. “And don’t pick anything up.” This was my first time in a minefield. I was listening carefully. It was a misty morning in Cambodia, and although it was barely 10 am, the heat was already baking the air. I was about to enter a known minefield near the Trei Nhoar commune, less than an hour’s drive from Siem Reap, Cambodia’s second-largest city and the gateway to its legendary temples. The HALO Trust, a UK-based NGO and the world’s largest demining nonprofit, was working to clear the mines from the area, and Schillings, HALO’s deputy program manager for Cambodia, was judiciously advising me on what not to do in…

WE NEED MORE BLACK BIOGRAPHIES. SCHOLARS SPEND A significant amount of time writing about historical moments and movements, but in the United States, the study of individuals is often reserved for US presidents, other well-known political figures, and celebrities. In terms of Black biographies (or the lack thereof), the numbers are astonishing: We are still living in an era of firsts and onlies. Some of the best-known Black figures of the 20th century have had only one biography written about them—or none at all. Alex Haley wrote or cowrote two of the most notable books of the century, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the iconic Roots: The Saga of an American Family, and yet the only in-depth biography of him wasn’t published until 2015. There is still no serious…

AT THE END OF A SUMMER-LONG, 148-DAY STRIKE BY the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers agreed to a historic new contract with the union, which was ratified in early October. The encroaching gig-like working conditions of the streaming era were front and center in the WGA fight, as they are in the ongoing work stoppage by the Screen Actors Guild. “The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce,” the WGA declared in early May, as the union launched its strike. “From their refusal to guarantee any level of weekly employment in episodic television, to the creation of a ‘day rate’ in comedy variety, to their stonewalling on free work for screenwriters and on AI for all writers, they…

CONSIDER THE MANY DIFFICULTIES GIRLS HAVE TO SURMOUNT to get into college these days. Rape and attempted rape, sexual harassment, being hit on by teachers and coaches and fellow students and older men, eating disorders, pregnancy scares and pregnancy itself, the poisonous social media and smartphone environment with its looks obsessions, bullying, and mean-girl/mean-boy pile-ons. No wonder 57 percent of the girls polled by the CDC said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless,” versus 29 percent of the boys. Thirty percent reported seriously considering suicide, and 13 percent attempted it. One in 10 said they had been raped—I still can’t take that in. Some of the despair may be related to the Covid lockdowns, but the trends have been rising for a decade. Despite these threats to their mental and…

ITHE SPRING OF 2022, MARISOL CANTÚ FOUND HERSELF IN AN AWKWARD SITUation. Several hundred workers were going on strike at the 120-year-old Chevron oil refinery just a few miles from her house in Richmond, Calif., and Cantú, a longtime labor activist, felt she had to show up to support them. “There was no way my spirit was going to allow me to just sit on the sidelines,” she says. But she also knew that the workers might regard her with suspicion. Cantú, an ESL instructor and political activist who grew up in Richmond, had become a vocal opponent of the fossil-fuel industry. On a podcast she’d started, Cantú and her cohosts, two other Bay Area organizers, had called for Richmond to become a fossil-fuel-free community. That couldn’t be achieved without…