Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i The Nation

I WILL LEAVE IT TO OTHERS TO DISCUSS THE PRECedents for Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., from Thích Quang Đuc to Norman Morrison to Mohamed Bouazizi to Irina Slavina to Wynn Alan Bruce. Yes, this has happened before. The world has been a terrible place for too many, for too long, and for that reason, the rare few who are most inclined to feel that terror, to breathe in its ashes, have found no other option but to set themselves on fire in protest—so that others may be forced to breathe in some of those ashes too. A debate has erupted about how best to interpret Bushnell’s last act. Was it heroic? Pointless? Another opportunity to opine on the need for more robust mental health…

FOR DECADES NOW, ELECTORAL POLITICS HAS CAPTURED too much of the political imagination of the American left—or, at least, of those occupying the cultural space that a left would if there were one in this country. In the mid-1990s, it seemed as though someone had surreptitiously changed the ground rules for what being on the left meant, and suddenly it was all about running people for public office. Nearly every four years since then, I’ve argued that by the time leftists begin to notice that the mainstream Democratic options on offer are less than desirable, it’s already too late to generate any better ones. The reason this happens with such regularity is that so much of the nominal left has lost sight of the limits of the electoral realm as…

Shawn Fain is more than just a labor leader. Since his election a year ago as president of the United Auto Workers, following a rank-and-file revolt against corruption and complacency in one of America’s most storied labor unions, Fain has emerged as the embodiment of working-class anger over income inequality and corporate greed. Last fall, he steered the UAW through a historic strike against the Big Three domestic automakers. The walkout was powered by savvy media strategies and fiery rhetoric that had Fain’s enemies accusing him of inciting a class war. (He cheerfully embraces that image, even appearing once in an “Eat the Rich!” T-shirt.) Since that victory, the UAW has launched a drive to organize foreign-owned auto plants, along with Elon Musk’s Tesla; called for a cease-fire in Gaza;…

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, GROWING UP IN the rural but rapidly developing small town of my youth, I believed that cities were the place where one could find freedom. The greatest disappointment of my young adulthood has been the discovery that this is not true. Not only is it not true, but those glimpses of freedom I have had—freedoms that have allowed me to better understand myself and coexist with others different from me—have all been eradicated by force, whether that force was social, economic, political, or (usually) all three. In their place, we find sameness, a sameness we all complain about: the boring suburbanization of urban aesthetics that creates a miserable middle-class monoculture where every bar serves overpriced drinks and every restaurant overpriced small plates, where every store promises…

A HEAD OF MICHIGAN’S PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY, I TRAVELED TO THE STATE TO meet with arab american leaders, students, and progressives upset over president biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. As a progressive member of Congress who strongly supports a permanent cease-fire with the release of all hostages, I was there to show respect, hear their concerns, and serve as a liaison to the administration as a member of President Biden’s national advisory board. My first meeting was at a coffee shop in Dearborn with leaders from Emgage—an organization dedicated to empowering Muslim American communities. Our conversation didn’t center on politics or the push to have Democrats vote “uncommitted” instead of for President Biden. Instead, Assad Turfe, the deputy executive of Wayne County, told me about how both of his…

ON FEBRUARY 23, THE THIRD DAY OF THE CONSERVAtive Political Action Conference, Ryan Sanchez, who had been kicked out of the US Marine Corps for his involvement with white nationalists, sidled up to me at a table in the lobby of the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. He had recognized me because of my reporting on the far-right movement. Sanchez had slicked-back hair and wore a black leather jacket over a black mock turtleneck. His friends buzzed around us while he talked at me; eventually he suggested that we pose for a photo together. I didn’t want to leave and cede ground to a bunch of extremists, but neither did I want to be photographed with them. I put my head down, covered my…

AGING DOES STRANGE THINGS TO YOUR MIND, BUT then so does political partisanship. In early February, the argument over Joe Biden’s age was turbocharged after a report by special counsel Robert Hur characterized him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” This provoked the centrist pundit Jonathan Chait into making the bizarre case that senility was not necessarily a disqualifying trait in a president. In a dialogue with a colleague at New York magazine, Chait said, “Well, if [Biden is] controlled by advisers, is that unacceptable? If the advisers are making good decisions? Reagan was pretty senile and controlled by advisers. Everybody’s forgotten this, but the accounts of his mental state are harrowing. Nobody cared because the results were fine.” Not content with invoking Reagan’s cognitive impairment, Chait added,…

IT WAS AN ORDINARY SATURDAY AT THE MUSEUM of Modern Art. Tourists flowed through the galleries, lined up at the bathrooms, meandered through the institution’s three gift shops, and looked at special exhibitions—such as An-My Lê’s photographic meditations on perpetual violence and diaspora. Then, at 3:30 pm, in a gallery tucked into a fourth-floor corner, a group of masked patrons congregated beside an assemblage of objects evoking racialized violence in the Jim Crow South and began to distribute bright yellow brochures. Some people reflexively turned them down; others thumbed through the pages. “MoMA trustees fund genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism,” the brochures read. Similar scenes were playing out in dozens of galleries across the museum. Then, at least 500 protesters (including the authors of this article) flooded toward the MoMA atrium…

Plain Speaking Re “Stop the War”: D.D. Guttenplan makes several important points in his December 11/18, 2023, editorial about the conflict in Gaza, but I’m afraid he still falls into some common traps. Guttenplan writes that “the leadership of Hamas remains as committed as ever to its genocidal fantasy that the road to a free Palestine must be paved with the bodies of dead Jews.” One need only look at the Hamas charter of 2017 that superseded its 1988 charter—which everyone still refers to as if the revised version didn’t exist—to see that Hamas harbors no genocidal intent toward Jews and that its fight is not with Jews but with a country that occupies the Palestinians’ home and oppresses them in myriad ways. Hamas’s attack on October 7 was a…

THREE MILES NORTH of the glitzy resorts and casinos of the Las Vegas Strip, the Fremont Street Experience offers a glimpse of an older, rawer Sin City. Instead of lush fountains and marble statues, it has a curved arcade ceiling consisting of countless LED panels that conjure up endless permutations of psychedelic light displays; instead of fancy, sexy revues in tastefully decked-out theaters, it has scantily clad young women in fishnet stockings and feather boas, walking up and down the street inviting tourists to take photos with them in suggestive poses; instead of billion-dollar pleasure palaces with fine dining, sprawling casinos, and designer stores, it has neon-illuminated dive bars and tourist restaurants, dimly lit gambling halls, and kitschy hole-in-the-wall tourist shops, many of them—like their counterparts in New York City’s…

BENEATH JOE BIDEN’S AVUNCULAR, AW-SHUCKS DEmeanor lies an ego even larger than his mouth. Three presidential campaigns across three separate decades say everything one needs to know about the man’s sense of himself and his role in history. And it must come as some relief to Biden that history still has a role for him. The Cold War that shaped American politics for most of his career has given way not to an age of international peace and untroubled prosperity but to an era of political and economic upheaval in which his can-do optimism is still very much in demand. Or, at least, this is what he and his boosters assure us. The institutions of American democracy are still worthy of our faith; what we need is the right person…

WHEN THE FIRST SEASON OF TRUE DETECTIVE APPEARED IN 2014, we were living in a different era of television—before auteur series and anthologies were commonplace, when seeing movie stars on the small screen still meant something, when a writer’s or a director’s vision could be so novel as to draw millions to their proverbial water coolers. It wasn’t just a buttoned-up Woody Harrelson and a gaunt and philosophical Matthew McConaughey that lured us in, but the layered timelines, the potentially cosmic intrigue, Nic Pizzolatto’s indulgent verbosity, and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s absorbing camera. Now, a decade later, with the appearance of True Detective’s fourth season—its first without Pizzolatto at the helm and its first with a subtitle, Night Country—movie stars and auteurist directors are no longer novel. Since True Detective’s debut…

THE SOUNDS OF HARSH WEATHER OVER A BLACK SCREEN, then a snowy landscape in long shot. A white van drives into the frame, the red triangle of a yield sign the one note of color here, and a man gets out. He walks alone toward the camera. As About Dry Grasses begins, the only clear thing is that we are in the land of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish filmmaker who, over the course of nine films, has carved this particular terrain out of rural stagnation and urban anomie. Long, dense, and elliptical, Ceylan’s films are thorny and difficult, and rousing in their starkness. There is a great pleasure in seeing them, despite their bitter stories of failure and regret. Each one, from The Small Town (1997) to The Wild…

WHAT WOULD A SECOND TRUMP TERM LOOK LIKE? In Trump’s first term, his menace was mitigated by his sloth, ignorance, and incompetence. Don’t count on that if he wins in the fall. This time, the right is intent on turning Trumpism into a governing agenda, as illustrated by the Heritage Foundation’s multimillion-dollar Project 2025. The project includes four elements: the 900-plus-page “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” which details the right’s agenda for each major federal department; the “Playbook,” a still-secret compilation of initiatives for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration; a right-wing version of LinkedIn designed to recruit thousands of MAGA movement operatives to staff the government; and a Presidential Administration Academy to train them on how to operate. Heritage’s proudest moment was its 1980 “Mandate…

FOR A MOMENT IN 2021, IT WAS POSSIBLE TO BELIEVE that Joe Biden might pull US foreign policy out of the 20-year wreckage that he’d helped to create. Like almost every US politician after 9/11, Biden, then a senator, cheered the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. But by the time he became vice president in 2009, Biden recognized that the war had become a quagmire. While he wasn’t ready to pull up stakes, he advised Barack Obama against escalation, to no avail. When he was elected president himself, Biden inherited the agreement for a withdrawal from Afghanistan that Donald Trump had negotiated with the Taliban. Taking a big political risk, Biden seized the opportunity. The spectacle of desperate Afghans flocking to the Kabul airport during a Taliban military takeover created…

386 Number of days that Flaco the owl lived freely in New York City after being let out of the Central Park Zoo (Flaco died on February 23) 1.68K Number of signatures gathered on a Change.org petition opposing the recapture of Flaco 20M Number of birds confined to cages in US homes -2.9B Change in the North American bird population since 1970 3.2K Number of live birds trained for Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds 240 Miles per hour that the world’s fastest animal, the peregrine falcon, can fly 314M Number of Spotify streams for Nelly Furtado’s hit song “I’m Like a Bird”…

At Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point, Mo., stone buildings overlook verdant gardens. These so-called “Restorative Justice Gardens” are part of a carefully choreographed attempt by the Missouri Department of Corrections to portray prisons as humanitarian enterprises. It’s just one example of a nationwide effort to use agriculture and nature to gloss over the reality of mass incarceration. More than 660 state prisons have agricultural initiatives of some kind. But if agriculture “restores” anything, it’s the prison plantation. Percentage of State-Run Adult Prisons That Have Agriculture Between 2018 and 2023, American prisons sold almost $200 million worth of agricultural products, many of which have made their way into the offerings of major food brands. Incarcerated workers are typically paid between $0.14 and $1.41 an hour in America. As cofounders of…

“MANY CIS PEOPLE (I FIRST WROTE ‘CIVILIANS’) ARE BAFfled by transgender matters,” writes Lucy Sante near the end of her crisp new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, which begins, and ends, with her own coming-out as a trans woman in 2021. Sante writes to unbaffle them and—like all good memoirists—to explain her life to herself. And in the process, she describes an aspect of existence common to her generation of trans people and so to mine, too: We often felt that we grew up profoundly alone. Born in Belgium in 1954, Sante became a professional writer in the New York of the early 1980s. She flourished in the downtown experimental punk-and-art scene that also included Kathy Acker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Foreman, Nan Goldin, Tom Verlaine, the Contortions, DNA,…

Honey, what was it—my original stinking sin?When, thick-tongued and fangless, I hungered to be seenfrom all angles, how could you take those pipe dreamsto mean Psycho, shower scene? Was I too tender for you? You left me slow and lowly.Fall off the bone. Forked up wholly holeyto my febrile fibers. What other grub daydreamsof filling up your belly? Come REM, come starry comas sopped in sepia,how come you keep on slipping past my sleepierdefenses, the walk-on cameo of my dreams?Cast me. I’d play it creepier. If I were you? Sin would sun, blisters unblueto blusters, everything indrawn bloom intoblank sheets. Untouched. If you (in your dreams’ dreams)were me, you’d hate you too and gratefully, hate to be granted a way with words,away-with-murder words, a wave dragged shorewardsdredging the unconscious, a…