Tabla de contenidos para June 12/19, 2023 en The Nation

AFTER MORE THAN THREE YEARS, TITLE 42—A POLICY THAT ALLOWED IMMIGRATION officers to return migrants they encountered at the border with Mexico without a hearing, thereby shutting hundreds of thousands out of the asylum system—has ended. The Biden administration didn’t rescind Title 42 because of a desire to rebuild the asylum process, but because it had to. The statute authorizing the border closure is part of the Public Health Service Act. Once Biden lifted the Covid-related emergency declarations, the pretext for Title 42 disappeared. Instead of a return to the pre-pandemic status quo, however, the end of Title 42 has ushered in a labyrinthine set of new regulations, many of which are right out of Trump’s playbook. In order to qualify for asylum, migrants must now make an appointment with…

THE DRUMBEAT FOR SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN TO resign has reached a kind of dull fever pitch. Aside from the open secret of her cognitive decline, the California Democrat was “working from home” for three months straight due to shingles, holding up President Biden’s judicial nominees in Washington, D.C., at a time when women are dying like it’s 1973 all over again. Now Feinstein is back in the Senate, looking and sounding completely decrepit. There’s absolutely nothing feminist about defending her nonexistent “right” to remain in office, no matter what Kirsten Gillibrand tries to argue on CNN. Yet there is a double standard at work here, and leftist men in particular would do well to check themselves. At 89, Feinstein is the oldest sitting US senator, first elected to local office…

Congratulations to The Nation’s editorial director and publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the recipient of the Second Annual Marcus Raskin Award for Civic and Intellectual Courage. The award recognizes “an outstanding and brave leader in the fields Marc was passionate about, including peace, social reconstruction, art, and politics.” Raskin was a valued member of The Nation’s editorial board, and his son, Jamie Raskin, the US representative from Maryland’s Eighth District, is a longtime contributor. A joint initiative of the Institute for Policy Studies—a progressive organization dedicated to building a more equitable, ecologically sustainable, and peaceful society—and the Raskin family, the award honors Marc’s legacy of speaking truth to power. Vanden Heuvel was chosen by a committee of Raskin family members and IPS staff, who said in their nominating note: “For decades,…

ANIMALS ABOUND IN THE FILMS OF KELLY REICHARDT. Some are loyal companions, such as the titular canine of Wendy and Lucy. Others are kept in servitude by their human owners, like the oxen that pull a wagon train in Meek’s Cutoff. Usually they occupy a more ambiguous place, like the horses cared for by a ranch hand in Certain Women: They are both a commodity she manages and her only source of companionship in the barren isolation of rural Montana. In her latest film, Showing Up, Reichardt introduces two new members to this unruly menagerie: a house cat and a pigeon. The cat belongs to Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor who has a day job as an administrative assistant at a small college. In the middle of the night, it…

JOE BIDEN’S REELECTION CAMPAIGN ISN’T GOING well. Since announcing his bid for a second term in April, the president’s poll numbers have remained dismal. RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls gives him a 41.4 percent approval rating among likely voters, while 53.8 percent disapprove. And it won’t necessarily get better when Biden is in a two-person race against a MAGA Republican. The overall RCP average of recent polls currently has Biden trailing former president Donald Trump by 1.4 points, while a mid-May Harvard CAPS/Harris survey put the incumbent down by seven points against the indicted Republican. An early May ABC News/Washington Post poll had Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading Biden by five points. These numbers should be a clear wake-up call. Biden’s been a better president than most progressives expected, and…

WHEN LIBERALS WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY, they have Technicolor nightmares: the orange oaf inciting an attack on the Capitol by his red-cap-wearing MAGA minions, including the QAnon shaman with his ridiculous stars-and-stripes facial makeup. But the threat to democracy is multipronged and doesn’t always come in vibrant hues. Trump’s most thuggish supporters represent the street-fighting wing of the right. But as much as the goons unleashed a level of violence unseen in national politics in decades, they also proved politically ineffectual. The January 6, 2021, insurrection was successfully thwarted; Joe Biden was duly inaugurated; the majority of the public was horrified by Donald Trump’s antics; the January 6 committee provided a narrative that blamed Trump and cemented the popular consensus; and the Democrats have successfully used the memory…

Yes! ERIONA HYSOLLI IF YOU HAD A CHANCE TO SAVE A SPECIES from extinction, would you take it? I would—and I am. There are numerous arguments in favor of de-extinction science, but I want to focus on the most pressing one: conservation. Experts predict that the earth could soon lose at least 40 percent of its biodiversity. My colleagues and I often cite a stat from the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson: that around 30,000 species are disappearing every year, or nearly three per hour. And yet we have the capacity not only to stop extinction but to reverse it. To save the planet’s biodiversity, de-extinction must become Conservation 2.0. My team and I at Colossal, a de-extinction company and lab, are establishing protocols, partnerships, and programs to create reproducible, affordable,…

ON APRIL 25, FOUR DISABILITY RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS SUED California state agencies and officials in an attempt to over-turn the End of Life Option Act, a seven-year-old law that allows doctors to prescribe lethal medication to people who have six months or less to live. The plaintiffs assert that the law violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which form the foundation for disability rights law in the United States. “We’re alleging that the law is inherently discriminatory,” said Michael Bien, the chief counsel and a primary author of the complaint. “It excludes or discriminates against people with disabilities, by depriving them of suicide prevention services.” The disability rights activists are currently waiting to find out if their case has standing. The groups and individuals…

EVER SINCE I READ MEDIA SCHOLAR JULIE TURNOCK’S The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism, I haven’t been able to watch a movie or TV show that contains special effects without focusing on the wrong things. Instead of dragons or landscapes from the past, I see particles everywhere: fog and dust and mist and dirt and shrapnel and rain. These digital details are meant to provide the texture of reality, but now I see them as a constant blanket of static coating the action. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, so if you enjoy admiring the realism of elven villages, don’t read this book. The Empire of Effects is ostensibly about Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company that George Lucas started in the 1970s…

IN EARLY MAY, TEXAS RESIDENT GABRIELLA GONZALEZ traveled to Colorado for abortion care. The journey out of state is a familiar one for Texans, who have lived under a draconian six-week abortion ban since 2021, well before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, as well as a criminal “trigger law” that imposes up to life in prison for providers since last August. Like so many before her, the 26-year-old mother of three was forced to leave her home state for health care. Upon her return, Gonzalez’s 22-year-old ex-boyfriend Harold Thompson—who is believed to have impregnated her and did not approve of her abortion—sought revenge. During an argument at a gas station in Dallas the morning after she returned, Thompson placed her in a choke hold and then…

FLORIDA GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS, WHO WAS planning to launch his presidential campaign as this issue of The Nation went to press, is accruing leadership credentials in a party that no longer exists. DeSantis has used his supermajority in the Florida Legislature to launch a head-spinning array of salvos in the right-wing culture wars—from an anti-trans surveillance regime in public schools and rolling book bans to an improbable assault on Disney as the avatar of all things woke. But even as DeSantis has been polishing up his inquisitorial résumé, he’s been hemorrhaging support among the conservative movement faithful. Some of that slippage may be due to DeSantis’s defiantly anti-charismatic stump performances, or a reaction to the sort of executive overreach that comes with a state government’s steady transformation into an ideological…

MARY RICKERT OPENS HER IPAD, CLICKS ON HER HATE-MAIL folder, and shows me some of the screeds she has received over the past three years. One begins: “I’d like to fuck Mary Rickert in the face with a brick.” Another has the subject line “Going, going, gone, dead woman walking.” She closes the folder, shudders, and says, “I have PTSD because of this, just from the insanity of it all. I have nightmares all the time. Watching the county just crumble is absolutely devastating for me… watching it being taken over by a far-right group.” Rickert is a member of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. Last year, she narrowly survived a recall effort, as did a colleague, Joe Chimenti. But another supervisor, board chair Leonard Moty—a former police chief…

ARABESQUES, THE FIRST AND ONLY NOVEL by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Anton Shammas, was originally translated into English 35 years ago, in 1988. It was a time of great turmoil and hope, with the Palestinian Intifada entering its second year, and it was also a time when the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian solidarity seemed to show more promise than they had at any other time. As though in confirmation, Shammas’s novel appeared, with its array of Israeli and Palestinian characters reflecting on one another and their relations in a wide range of locales. Perhaps most important, the novel managed to narrate the story of the Nakba in Hebrew to a Jewish Israeli public. When I read it back then, it represented a bold and promising departure suitable to the revolutionary times…

BEFORE KATHERINE DUNN PUBLISHED HER CELEBRATED novel Geek Love in 1989, she was a struggling single parent in Portland, Ore., paying rent by serving hash browns, painting houses, and pouring beers at a biker bar, where she became adept at breaking up knife fights. If this lean time was a prelude of sorts, it also came after an important chapter in her life had ended: the wide-open years of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Dunn had dropped out of Reed College to go vagabonding around the world. More an observer of the era’s revolutionary energies than a participant, she had also become a writer during this period, penning two slim, savage novels about recalcitrant misfits—Attic and Truck—that were snapped up by a publishing industry seeking voices who could…