The Nation May 2024

IN MAY OF OUR SENIOR YEAR, MY FRIENDS AND I—along with some 300 others—occupied the lobby of Uris Hall, directly across from a trustees’ meeting in Low Library, Columbia’s administration building, to demand that the university divest from companies with ties to South Africa. This was 1978: Jimmy Carter was in the White House, the liberation (as we would have put it) of Saigon had occurred just three years earlier, and with the United States not at war (at least overtly) anywhere in the world, we turned our attention abroad, to the apartheid regime of South Africa—a regime opposed by Carter but sustained by Wall Street. For those of us who came to Morningside Heights with the protests of 1968 very much on our minds, our chance to answer the…

IN LATE APRIL, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU POSTED A VIDEO warning that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in the United States. It was a crudely inaccurate characterization (and from a man whose military campaign in Gaza has destroyed all the enclave’s universities). Nevertheless, as protests against the war in Gaza have spread on campuses across the country, news coverage has presented the demonstrators as “pro-Hamas” hooligans, a line trumpeted by grandstanding politicians who have paraded through Columbia University, the epicenter of the student organizing, purporting to defend Jews. If anyone is taking over Columbia, however, it is right-wing opponents of the critical thinking that universities foster. On April 24, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a demagogic whistle-stop at the school to denounce how “lawless agitators and radicals”…

IT WAS JUST BEFORE 3 AM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT IN South Philadelphia, and I was watching an angry inflatable chicken fight a Japanese otter mascot in the middle of a hastily assembled wrestling ring. Around me, several hundred other spectators chanted, “Holy shit! Holy shit!” I was two cheap whiskeys deep and had become incredibly invested in the drama unfolding before me. As the moments ticked by, the otter faced off against a trio of fresh challengers, and the chicken was vanquished. During the fracas, the Japanese women’s wrestling legend Aja Kong made a surprise appearance, drawing roars from the audience and briefly dominating the ring before her quick elimination. My friend Hank, a wrestling fanatic with a two-and-a-half-foot-long rattail, had smuggled me into Joey Janela’s Spring Break: Clusterfuck…

“YOU GOT A WIN. TAKE THE WIN,” PRESIDENT Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan intercepted the majority of the Iranian missiles and drones launched at Israeli military installations in mid-April. Not long after, White House national security spokesman John Kirby went on CNN’s State of the Union to claim victory. “This was an incredible success, really proving Israel’s military superiority and, just as critically, their diplomatic superiority—that they have friends in the region, they have friends around the world that are willing to help them,” he said. Yet on closer inspection, Israel’s tense escalatory exchanges with Iran were hardly a win for Israel. The details of this tit-for-tat reveal that Israel is not the newly triumphant leader…

ON A SUNNY, COLD FEBRUARY DAY, I DROVE FOUR hours from Portland, Oregon, to Grants Pass, a town of about 40,000 in the southern part of the state. I wanted to talk to residents about the homelessness crisis there and ask whether they thought the city should still be allowed to punish its roughly 600 unhoused people for not having a home. Grants Pass has no emergency shelter. Yet a few years ago, it passed a number of anti-sleeping laws that made it impossible for people in the city without homes to avoid constant fines and jail time. Then, in 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a permanent injunction to bar the enforcement of such anti-homelessness provisions. I headed to Morrison Park, where four people sat around a…

IF YOU SIT DOWN AND TALK WITH REPUBLICANS, which I advise against doing, you will notice that they justify nearly every one of their awful policies with a call to states’ rights. They say they want to take power away from national representatives in Washington, D.C., and redistribute it to state and local governments, which, they claim, are best equipped to determine the best policies for their constituents’ particular, parochial concerns. They use this appeal to “federalism” to shield them from moral accountability for their disastrous actions. Republicans will say, for instance, that their intention is not to take away abortion rights but merely to let the states decide when a person can be forced to give birth against their will. They are lying, of course. We know this because…