Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i The Nation

THE FIRST VOTE I CAST IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION was for Jimmy Carter in the 1976 New York primary. Carter came in fourth, after Senators Henry Jackson and Morris Udall and a slate of uncommitted delegates. Yet I bet two friends that the Georgia governor would win the nomination and go on to victory in November—the last political bet I ever won. What made me so confident? Mainly Carter’s frank rejection of racism—a turn that, as someone born and raised in the South, I felt the country desperately needed. But also a turn that it seemed the country fervently wanted. Carter had lost his first run for governor of Georgia, in 1966, to the arch-segregationist Lester Maddox, and in his second attempt he had been careful to say as little…

ELON MUSK AND VIVEK RAMASWAMY, TASKED TO lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, recently pledged to strip federal funding from “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.” That might seem like one consequence of an election: Groups and causes fall out of favor with a new administration. But their reference to defunding Planned Parenthood is misleading. The statement feeds into a longstanding campaign to suggest that federal dollars broadly pay for abortion in states, which they do not, and that Planned Parenthood clinics are unique beneficiaries of federal programs, which they are not. At the same time, the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments about whether South Carolina can disqualify Planned Parenthood from being reimbursed by Medicaid for services that have nothing to do with abortion. In fact, South…

AS THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ASSUMES power, most public attention remains focused on the president-elect’s cabinet selections—a grab-bag assortment of billionaires, Fox News personalities, conspiracy theorists, accused sexual assaulters, cronies, and toadies. Yet all through the eventful and unprecedented transition phase of Donald Trump’s restoration term, one key player has been notably quiet: Vice President–elect JD Vance. As speculation over the fate of various cabinet nominees waxed and waned, Vance was mostly confined to his pet hobby of social media posting—claiming, for instance, that Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin was overselling the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, or hailing Daniel Penny’s exoneration for killing New York City subway passenger Jordan Neely with a choke hold. Even though these kinds of talk-radio takes are an odd look for an…

Systemic Failure In “What Was the Biggest Factor in Kamala Harris’s Defeat?” [January 2025], Isabella M. Weber and Elie Mystal debate whether it was the cost-of-living crisis or bigotry that was more decisive. Neither factor demolished Harris’s candidacy; it was “status-quoism” and its heresies, hypocrisies, and hubris that upended otherwise functional democratic governance. Jeet Heer’s penetrating analysis in the same issue [“All-System Fail”] cannot be overstated: “Democrats lost because they allowed Trump to be the only voice of antiestablishment rage.” BRIJ MOHAN SANTA BARBARA, CA Weber and Mystal both raise valid points about why Harris was defeated. But the framing of the debate sets aside what I think was the biggest factor: messaging. Trump’s team simply made better television. I use the term broadly to include all the ways in…

On a sun-drenched Friday afternoon at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, the writer, podcaster, and filmmaker Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and I stand in front of a series of arresting portraits of Black women that the artist Mary Graham has painted on brown paper bags. When Thomas curated his first show with the museum in 2020, aside from the photos and transcripts that his co-curator printed out and sent to his cell at San Quentin State Prison, he could experience the show only through press coverage—one of the few opportunities for incarcerated people to connect with the outside world. Thomas had long believed that the reverse could also be true: that incarcerated people’s writing, like the articles being produced at the San Quentin News, the monthly prison newspaper…

IN EARLY 2020, 20-YEAR-OLD SIERRA, A STRUGGLING NEW MOM, FOLlowed her son’s father from a college town in Indiana to Alabama, where he had found a job. Though she and Derek were unmarried, Sierra thought it would be best for their toddler, Kailani, to have both Mom and Dad nearby, even if they weren’t living together. Things stayed tough for the family—until Covid relief began coming through. “She could barely believe it,” the sociologist Jessica Calarco writes in her book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Sierra got her first Covid stimulus check in April 2020. (All the names in this section are pseudonyms.) A government program offered her rent and utilities relief. She got the expanded child tax credit for Kailani, and she could pay for…

Some of the most fearless, interactive, and creative jazz of the 1960s and ’70s retained two elements generally discarded by the ascendant movements of free jazz and fusion, namely conventional song forms and the swing beat. Forces of Nature documents exactly this idiom. This guide to additional listening is far from complete. The immediate predecessors were the second Miles Davis Quintet and the John Coltrane Quartet. Miles Davis: My Funny Valentine; E.S.P.; Miles Smiles John Coltrane: My Favorite Things; “Live” at the Village Vanguard; Crescent However, this particular idiom, with its emphasis on tight unison melodies, complex modal harmony, and a strong intellectual tilt, was defined less by Davis or Coltrane than by their sidemen, who produced many of the classic studio albums found in any serious jazz collection. Herbie…

NOAM CHOMSKY IS THE MOST FAMOUS critic of US empire in the world. No single living intellectual comes close. Even John Mearsheimer, the international relations theorist wellknown for his critiques of US foreign relations, can’t hold a candle to Chomsky: A Google Ngram search quickly reveals how many more times Chomsky’s name appears in English-language texts than Mearsheimer’s. And Chomsky is not just one of the most cited writers on the subject of US foreign relations; he’s that rare scholar who has made the leap from academia to popular culture. His name appears in songs by the punk band NOFX (“And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy / All because I read a little Noam Chomsky”) and the comedian Bo Burnham (“My show is a little bit silly…

It arrives for your birthday, without any gift. It has the face of a candle-flame,little flickering incisorschewing at the hem of a sleeve. A guest, you have no choice but to serve itboiled eggs for breakfast, pots of tea. Afternoons spent sketching in the garden,weeding the erratic zinnias. Night is what you come to fear. Pacing, muttering, unexplained thumpsas of books crashing to the floorin the empty room beneath the stairs. When the walls dissolve between dreamand waking there is nothingto do but open the door and stride barefoot into a utopia of freshly fallen snow.…

I ALWAYS SEEM TO BE LISTENING TO JAMIE XX JUST BEfore bad news. In Colour, his debut album, came out in 2015, and I was still spinning it a year later when Donald Trump won his first term in the White House. Another eight years and another presidential election, and I find myself in the same place—only this time I’m listening to his second album, In Waves. America has fractured once again along the familiar lines of race and class and gender, and I’m here listening to vibey electronic music. There have been some changes, though, in what I’m hearing. Where In Colour was more self-conscious, In Waves feels effortfully effortless; it’s the sound of sprezzatura. It’s meant for the club or the after-party or—as the Australians call it—the kick-on…

NO MORE DEALS. NO MORE GAMES. NO MORE PARLIAMENTARIAN PARLOR TRICKS designed to dull the roughest edges of Donald Trump’s unconscionable policies. My greatest wish for the shambolic political party known as the Democrats this coming year is that they abandon the cloying institutional response to Trump that they have deployed to such little effect and instead let the people have what they say they want. Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that the Democrats should help Trump; I’m not recommending that they join in the evil he is about to unleash on the country and the world. But they should not spend another four years humping guardrails and holding a “center” that has already shifted so far to the right that it makes George W. Bush look…

DONALD TRUMP IS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to the freedom of the press. He tells his violent and rabid supporters that the media is an “enemy of the people,” sues news outlets over coverage he doesn’t like, and constantly threatens to change the laws to limit freedom of the press. Still, for all of his rhetorical bluster and real legal aggression, he is not the greatest danger to the press. That dystopian honor goes to the people who own the press themselves. In December, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to offer a written apology and make a $15 million “charitable contribution” to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The settlement was rightly viewed as a major legal victory for the grifter in chief, but…

1,634 Number of Americans whose sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden 65 Number of pardons that Biden issued 37 Number of death-row prisoners whose sentences were commuted by Biden 94 Total number of commutations that Donald Trump issued in his first term as president 143 Total number of pardons that Trump issued 2 Number of presidents since 1900 who issued fewer acts of clemency than Trump 2%–5% Estimated portion of people in US prisons who were wrongfully convicted…

Ethan Iverson writes in this issue about a newly surfaced recording of pianist McCoy Tyner and saxophonist Joe Henderson playing at the downtown club Slugs’ in 1966. Reading his piece, I wondered how The Nation covered the advent of jazz a century ago. Edited by the gentlemanly class traitor Oswald Garrison Villard, the magazine was turning ever more politically radical, yet it remained culturally somewhat conservative. Its early coverage of jazz reflected both tendencies, signaling an openness to the emerging form even as it offered a rather patronizing take on the music’s significance. “There are times,” the critic Henrietta Straus reluctantly granted in early 1922, “when jazz may be regarded as a virtue.” Straus was talking about a new concert by the classically trained white interpreter John Alden Carpenter, whom…

ON JULY 13, JUST EIGHT DAYS BEFORE HE ANNOUNCED the end of his presidential reelection bid, a besieged and testy Joe Biden defended himself from critics within his own party by boasting about his mastery of foreign policy. During Biden’s agitated Zoom call with moderate congressional Democrats, Colorado Representative Jason Crow—who as it happens voted with the president 100 percent of the time—cautioned him that voters were questioning his foreign policy leadership. Biden responded angrily: “Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific Basin!… We’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I…

BEING ALONE AND HELPLESS IN A HOSPITAL CORRIDOR—adrift between rooms, shifts, and diagnoses; stripped of one’s property and power, just a name among many others—is the closest that many of Fady Joudah’s American readers may come to understanding the kinds of dispossession that Palestinians have experienced for nearly a century. Lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of a cumbersome medical system, with few possessions and limited agency, the hallway patient is forced to justify himself again and again, to explain why he is there, what he needs, what belongs to him. Wheeled from corridor to ward to corridor, he has no permanent place to rest. Nurses come and go abruptly. Just as the patient thinks he has found a somewhat sympathetic doctor, that doctor’s shift ends and another arrives. The new…

I’LL ADMIT IT STRAIGHT OFF: I DON’T KNOW HOW TO write about Bob Dylan. It’s like being asked to write about the smell of your childhood home. Every awful, beautiful memory; every fear, desire, and promise; every premonition and uncertainty—it’s all there: the origin, the prototype, the coordinates of your future feeling. It’s hard to describe something like that. What I mean is, I really love Bob Dylan. I always have. He’s my favorite musician in a big, dumb, jealous, childish way: a love that is unknowing and primitive. And so I’m always a bit suspicious of the impulse, in myself and others, to figure out what exactly is going on there, to break him down, to make him manageable and coherent. Reading books and watching movies and listening to…

LAST FALL, DONALD TRUMP THREATENED TO IMpose stiff new tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. Recently he added the European Union to the target list, unless its member nations “make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas.” What, exactly, do all these impending tariffs portend? Economists tend to evaluate tariffs as good or (mostly) bad according to general precepts of economic theory. But as Trump definitely understands, in the real world they also serve political goals. With regard to Mexico and Canada, Trump’s political motives are fairly transparent. He wants to compel Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to seal the border, block migrants from heading north, and accept deportees from the United States—including many who will not be Mexicans. She…

FIRST THING ON THAT DARK, DARK MORNING AFTER Election Day, I woke up and e-mailed my editor at The Nation to ask if I could write about why Trump had won. Obviously, it was misogyny. Then I read 547 hot takes with my breakfast coffee and wrote back. Never mind! How on earth do people write—and think—so fast? Or maybe not think, because all of the opiners miraculously found that the vote confirmed they were right all along. It was racism, it was Fox News, it was the price of eggs. It was cynicism, it was Gaza, it was transphobia. It was resentment of billionaires, it was resentment of snooty cultural elites, it was resentment of “wokeness.” It was Biden staying in the race too long; no, it was Biden…

FOR TWO CONSECUTIVE THANKSGIVINGS, I HAVE mourned the deaths of my brothers, both killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. In 2023, my brother Majed and his family were killed in their sleep by an Israeli air strike. This past November 30, my brother Mahmoud, known in both Gaza and beyond as Chef Mahmoud, was targeted by an Israeli drone just 30 yards from the shelter in northern Gaza where his seven children waited for him. Mahmoud’s killing wasn’t just an attack on my family; it was a message. He wasn’t a fighter—he was a father, a humanitarian, and a man devoted to his community. His only “crime” was slowing the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza through his tireless efforts to organize aid, deliver meals, and sustain those around him.…

LET’S NOT BE NAÏVE ABOUT THE TROUBLES PLAGUING THE Democratic Party. The 2024 election was a kick in the teeth. Democrats lost the presidency and the Senate and failed in what should have been an easy bid to retake the House. Kamala Harris underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 national popular vote by more than 6 million ballots, and most of the party’s bedrock constituencies saw shifts toward Donald Trump. Harris faced a starkly racist and sexist campaign from Trump. Yet the election also took down white male Democrats with records of staying afloat in turbulent times, including Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Jon Tester of Montana. The erosion of Democratic support in 2024 was notable among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Black men. But it…

SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1960s or early ’70s, Lee Morgan bought his girlfriend Helen Moore a gun. “It’s for your protection,” he told her. Perhaps it was a thank-you gift, because Moore had turned the great jazz trumpeter’s life around. Despite being one of American music’s brightest lights in the 1960s—and scoring one of its biggest instrumental hits, “The Sidewinder”—Morgan had fallen deep into the despair of heroin addiction, to the point of being considered unreliable and unhireable by just about everyone. Moore picked him up, got him straight, and started managing his career. Then, in February 1972, in a plot twist worthy of an old blues ballad like “Frankie and Johnny,” Moore put a bullet into Morgan’s chest from the very gun he’d bought her. The murder took place…

IN HIS 1956 STUDY THE MEANING OF CONTEMPORARY REalism, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács distinguished between two literary traditions. Comparing the works of Thomas Mann, whom he considers a realist writer, with the works of Franz Kafka, whom he positions as a modernist, Lukács argued that Mann presents a view of individuals as social and political beings who are firmly rooted in an identifiable time and place. Kafka’s parables, by contrast, for Lukács, are stories of alienated individuals who are meaninglessly “thrown into the world” and they are consequently static and ahistorical. The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk sees the problem of literary form and social change a little differently. In her 2019 Nobel Prize lecture, she speaks of the need to create a new realism, “a sort…

1. Clouds of unwanted beauty followed us.We ran out of the decimated library— in the taverna they were still dishing out olives, pouring wineonly months after the neighborhood was exploding on the other side of the city. Corpses were not mythic, literature was not mythic.no more ontological romantic self-indulgent love. We breathed clouds of smoke and human sootflowers and çevapi and ash— 2. I was running over broken glass—the Quranic tree of life going up into a big holeover the border between love and death. In Srebrenica—we walked out of the battery factorythe rusted vaults and corroded plasterwhere thousands of bodies had vanished, one woman thought it was her own art studioshe was that confused— mid-day—we stood at a mass grave, flags flying in the blue windexhumed blue jeans, belts…