Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i The Nation

“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…

AMERICANS OBSESS SO MUCH ABOUT THE MORALITY OF abortion that it can be easy to forget that abortion is part of basic healthcare. Pregnancies sometimes develop into serious, even life-threatening medical complications that require they be terminated, and quickly. As detailed in a report from the research group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), abortion bans and restrictions have made treating these conditions much more difficult. Here’s a sample case from the report, describing a patient who experienced an incomplete miscarriage at between 16 and 18 weeks of pregnancy in a state with an abortion ban. The physician wrote: I meet her 2 days later in the ICU. She was admitted from the ER with severe sepsis…and bacteremia. Her fetus delivers; she is able to hold [the fetus]. We…

Ada Limón is currently serving a second term as the United States’ 24th poet laureate. She is the author of six poetry collections. Her new book, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, is an anthology of stunning original work Limón commissioned from some of the best poets writing in America today. Born in California to a family of Mexican ancestry, Limón now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. I spoke with her recently on the morning that she learned she’d been named one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year. SF: Where do I find you today? AL: I’m on a mountain in my hometown—Sonoma, California. My friends have property on Moon Mountain, in the Mayacamas range. It’s where I stay when I’m home. SF: What is happening outside? What…

I SRAEL’S WAR ON GAZA HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY hard to bear recently. In quick succession in early April, the world watched Israel withdraw from the Al-Shifa hospital complex, revealing stomach-churning scenes of death and destruction; bomb Iran’s embassy in Syria, an action that inspired retaliatory strikes by Iran and threatened to spark a wider conflict in the Middle East; and kill seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK) in what even some US officials said were intentional air strikes. These actions drew varying levels of condemnation. The attack on the WCK workers, most of whom were foreign nationals, was shameless enough to elicit criticism from President Biden, who considers WCK founder José Andrés a friend—but there is no sign that his performance of anger will cause Israel to change…

ON MAY DAY IN 1933 IN BIRMINGHAM, Alabama—a state that then had an unemployment rate of 25 percent—an unemployed committee held a mass meeting of Black and white workers. One member stood on a postal truck and addressed the crowd. A cop told her to stop. Several people chanted, “Let her speak! Let her speak!” The woman was soon joined by a Black man named Hosea Hudson, a member of the Communist Party. Then another man lent his voice to hers as well and hit the police officer in the head with a stick. Several plainclothes cops restrained the man; one took the stick and prepared to hit him with it. Hudson wrested the stick away and then was struck by a cop’s blackjack. “I buckled,” Hudson later recalled, “but…

IN THE WAKE OF BILL CLINTON’S PRESIDENTIAL VICTOry in 1992, a new genre of media—spanning literature, cinema, and television—emerged that sought to capture the energy of his campaign, the hope his election engendered, and the inevitable clash between the poetry of campaigning and the prose of governance. Among the first entries in this genre was The War Room, a documentary that was released a year after the election. It chronicled the various triumphs and tussles of his campaign and starred an inimitable figure who would become a regular presence in the American media—as a subject and a participant—for the next three decades: George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos had joined the Clinton campaign at the age of 30, distinguished himself as a shrewd strategist and communicator, and—in the early years of Clinton’s presidency—was…

TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE, AS HIS BLINDNESS PRogressed, the shy librarian who answered to the name Jorge Luis Borges began to feel alienated from his alter ego, the celebrated writer. “I know of Borges from the mail,” he wrote in a prose poem published in 1960. “I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature.” I’ve found myself thinking of Borges ever since I learned about the posthumous publication of Until August, by Gabriel García Márquez, who died in 2014. The themes of García Márquez’s new novel will be familiar to readers of his Love in the Time of Cholera: Every August, Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman on the far side of middle age, travels to an island off the coast of…

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”…

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…

LATELY, SEGMENTS OF THE AMERICAN LEFT SEEM TO be testing the “fuck around and find out” theory of elections, promoting protest voting, not voting at all, and even third-party candidates in the contest between democracy and authoritarianism. In a two-party system, electoral politics is essentially a bus: mass transit that’s designed to take as many people as possible, as close as possible, to where we all need to go. Yet a vocal faction of Gen Z in particular seems to expect Uber-like, on-demand service. “Politicians have to earn your vote!” they cry, explaining why they voted “uncommitted” in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, or participated in the “leave it blank” campaign in New York, or will not vote for Joe Biden in the primary at all. Yes, politicians have to earn…

MEASURE 110, THE LANDMARK STATEWIDE DRUG DEcriminalization initiative that Oregon passed in 2020 with 58 percent of the vote, had no sooner gotten off the ground than its most prominent plank—which decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs—was scuttled by the state Legislature this past April. House Bill 4002 recriminalizes “user” amounts of drugs, allowing people to avoid jail time of up to six months only if they seek treatment right away, while leaving in place the grant funding for low-barrier treatment programs created by Measure 110. Its legislative sibling, HB 5204, sets aside $200 million to fund various aspects of the bill, including additional treatment programs, on top of the $302 million that Measure 110 allocated. The way Measure 110 was implemented has been widely decried by both…

WHEN KAY FOUND OUT SHE WAS PREGNANT AT THE END OF last year, she knew three things clearly. “I was poor and I had an unwanted pregnancy and knew I couldn’t afford a standard abortion for hundreds of dollars,” she told me. A 29-year-old student already raising one child, Kay lives in Texas, where abortion is banned. The nearest clinic she could find was at least a 12-hour drive away. But Kay thought there might be another option. “I went to Google and started searching if it was possible somehow to receive abortion pills through the Internet.” It was not only possible; it was much easier and more affordable than Kay had expected. She found online services that offered to ship the same medications that were available in clinics right…

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…

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…

700 Number of people arrested on one day in April 1968 during the anti–Vietnam War protests at Columbia University 21 Number of days in 1985 that Columbia students held demonstrations demanding that the university divest from apartheid South Africa 15 Duration in days of a hunger strike held by Columbia students seeking an audience with the board of trustees to demand divestment from South Africa $39M Value of stock in US companies doing business in South Africa that Columbia pledged to sell in 1985 220K Number of shares of stock in G4S, then the world’s largest security firm, that Columbia promised to sell in 2015, after students launched a campaign to divest from private prison companies…

THE FIRST TIME ROSA saw snowflakes falling, she thought they were pieces of cotton. “I thought I was going to choke,” she told me. Rosa, who is from Honduras, had never seen snow before, but it’s become a familiar sight now that she’s living in Bozeman, Montana. The city, population about 56,000, is ringed by four mountain ranges in the Northern Rockies. It took her a while, but Rosa has learned to deal with the weather. “Now I think it’s very pretty,” she said in Spanish. “Our kids love to play in the snow.” Rosa, who has a round, serious face and long black hair, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Hondurans who have been displaced in recent years by political corruption, gang violence, economic stagnation, and environmental…

WE ARE ATTRACTED TO THE BIOGRAPHIES OF ARTISTS for a variety of reasons. We want to learn about their childhoods and lost loves, their petty and legitimate grievances, and the unfolding of their greatest ambitions. We want to understand how they did it. But when the artists are part of the doomed generation that saw thousands brutally cut down by AIDS at an obscenely young age, we are also drawn to their biographies for another reason: to better comprehend the mystery of the painful obstacles that defined their shortened lives, and how these experiences intersected with their creations. Brad Gooch’s new biography of one such artist, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, does precisely that, telling the story of Haring’s childhood in Pennsylvania, his meteoric rise to riches…

“FROM NOW ON, I WILL NOT TRUST ANYONE WHO ISN’T angry.” The science-fiction writer Joanna Russ set down those words in 1984. They might have been Russ’s motto. From her 1968 novel Picnic on Paradise, about a time-traveling, take-no-prisoners female assassin named Alyx, to her 1975 path-breaking lesbian and feminist novel The Female Man, to her collection of essays on feminism, What Are We Fighting For?, in 1997, Russ wrote unsparingly, if also elegantly, against those elements in society that keep women, especially lesbians, from becoming our best selves. Her novels and essays sometimes cut themselves short; other times, they cut to the bone. They could make room for hope, and for solidarity, and for erotic joy. Russ saw what was wrong with the world we know, how much needless…