Tabla de contenidos para September 4/11, 2023 en The Nation

IN LATE JULY, MIKE GONIDAKIS, THE PRESIDENT OF OHIO RIGHT TO LIFE, WAS handing out lawn signs urging Ohioans to vote yes on Issue 1 and doing his best to take a naked attempt to kneecap democracy in one of the country’s most gerrymandered states and make it sound like a popular uprising. “I’ve never seen this kind of enthusiasm in Ohio for our side since President Trump ran the first time around, back in 2016,” Gonidakis told me at the time. It wasn’t just anti-abortion activists who backed the initiative, put before voters by the state legislature, to raise the threshold for citizens to amend the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent, he said—although Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose had admitted that the measure was…

FRAN DRESCHER, THE PRESIDENT OF SAG-AFTRA, stole the show—and Hollywood’s lunch—when she announced the largest strike by the union of entertainment and media workers since 1960. That unmistakable voice pierced through the corporate pablum with the kind of no-bullshit moral clarity we’ve come to identify with the most famous democratic socialist in America, Bernie Sanders, or the once-highest-paid woman on TV, Judge Judy. It wasn’t just the strength of her words but the Yiddish-inflected cadence that has reverberated through more than a century of the American labor movement. Jewish women are inextricable from the history of labor rights; there’s nothing “unlikely” about the fact that Drescher has taken her place in it. The only shock is how little that history is acknowledged in mainstream discourse or on the contemporary left,…

SINCE 2021, THE PHOTOGRAPHER JORDAN GALE has been documenting the worsening housing crisis in Portland. The city was once a crown jewel of the Pacific Northwest, hailed as a destination for the upper middle class eager to escape the West Coast’s crowded metropolises. But as Portland’s population increased, driving up housing prices, its unhoused population ballooned. Oregon has a dire housing gap: The state currently needs 140,000 additional units, and that number could reach over 440,000 in the next 20 years unless drastic efforts are made. When such crises become large enough to affect thousands of families every day, individual stories get lost in the blizzard of statistics. Over the past two years, Gale’s work chronicling his home city’s plight has expanded to incorporate portraiture and handwritten testimony, increasingly becoming…

RUSSIA’S FULL-SCALE INVASION OF UKRAINE HAS SUNK US-RUSSIA relations to the lowest levels since the darkest days of the Cold War. No easing of tensions is looming on the horizon. Quite the contrary: The two countries appear to be locked in a downward spiral—centered on Ukraine but affecting all aspects of their relations—that could suddenly bring them to the verge of a direct military confrontation, with all the risk of a nuclear cataclysm that entails. The prevailing Western view is that Russian President Vladimir Putin bears full responsibility for this perilous state of affairs. Observers have identified the landmarks during the past 20-plus years that, they insist, unmistakably revealed Putin’s intentions but were downplayed by Western governments at the time: his flagrant interference in Ukraine’s presidential elections in 2004, the…

I’m shoving blueberriesinto my bloodstreamsmoking strawberriesout of a broken lightbulbsnorting raspberriesup my noseI’m smoking blackberriesrolled with tobaccoin a nightmare rotationof every personwho has broken my heartI am flicking the outside of the bagof lingonberrieswith my fingertipswetting for a taste of cranwaiting around all dayfor my plug to come throughwith ounces of boysengrams of huckle and black currantdon’t lecture me about pesticidesor how to handle delicaciestell me instead how to satiatehow to find my way back…

MUCH AS IT MAY PAIN PROGRESSIVES TO ACKNOWLEDGE it, Donald Trump’s legal troubles won’t prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee for president in 2024. The criminal charges the former president faces are serious, and he could well be convicted in the state courts of Georgia or New York, or in two federal trials. Eventually. But Trump’s bid won’t be derailed by the 91 indictments he faces for racketeering, falsifying business records, purloining classified documents, and fraudulently claiming victory in 2020. Even allowing for the unlikely possibility of jury verdicts and jail sentences before next summer, the Republican National Convention is shaping up as one big Trump rally. If anything, Trump’s troubles with the law have solidified his grip on a Republican Party that he’s remade in his own image—complete…

AS OF THIS SUMMER, JOE BIDEN’S ECONOMIC PLATFORM has been repackaged with a campaign-ready name: “Bidenomics.” Since announcing his reelection bid in April, the president has marshaled a body of talking points forcefully touting his impressive numbers on job creation, overall economic growth, and inflation. Meanwhile, Democratic consultants and campaign professionals are waiting for the other shoe to drop. They want Biden’s chronically poor approval ratings—mired at or around 40 percent—to start ticking upward by the time the 2024 campaign season officially kicks off in January. It’s a long-fetishized article of received political wisdom that a high-performing economy should translate into electoral gold for a president seeking a second term. Indeed, there’s a whole school of rational-choice political science holding that if a president meets certain key metrics of economic…

ANTELOPE ISLAND, THE LARGEST ISLAND IN UTAH’S GREAT Salt Lake, has not been an island for many years; indeed, its southern shore now extends into Salt Lake City. An eight-foot fence has been built to keep the island’s bison from roaming into the nearby airport and to protect its herd of bighorn sheep from cattle diseases. As the lake shrinks, Farmington Bay, to the island’s east, is rapidly disappearing too, so that Antelope will soon be attached to the string of suburbs north of the city by playa—the exposed, dry lake bed. Here, new housing developments, each near bright white churches and with names like “Shoreline,” rise up quickly on the former wetlands. A new highway is under construction to funnel commuters to downtown Salt Lake City. Toxic algal blooms…

The Right to Be Heard Re “The Right to Live,” by Sara Luterman [June 12/19]: I am very glad that The Nation is covering the disability rights movement’s long-standing opposition to “medical aid in dying,” especially its position that systemic pressures often negate an autonomous choice to die. However, I worry that centering the assisted-suicide debate on autonomy alone may cause some people to forget that much of the right-to-die movement’s rhetoric is hate speech, and that Canada’s “MAiD” program can be framed as a hate crime. Pro-assisted-suicide rhetoric and policies target disabled people as a group. It’s demoralizing to suggest that if someone needs help using the restroom, that person should think about killing herself. It’s even more hateful to help someone die by suicide because she is disabled.…

$39B Amount of student loan debt set to be forgiven that is now held up by a lawsuit 800K Number of borrowers affected 46% Portion of borrowers unprepared to resume federal student loan payments in October 36% Portion of borrowers whose income decreased during the forbearance period $37K Amount of the average federal student loan debt 50% Portion of Black adults in the US between the ages of 20 and 35 with student loan debt $116B Total amount of student loan forgiveness approved by the Biden administration, affecting more than 3.4 million borrowers…

GOING TO A PROUD BOYS RIOT WITH A NEO-NAZI IS NOT SOMETHING I ever expected to do. But in August 2021, I found myself driving through downtown Portland, Ore., with an avowed white supremacist named Alex Nelson. We were on our way to the abandoned K-Mart parking lot that the Proud Boys had commandeered for their “Summer of Love” rally. The event marked the one-year anniversary of a “Back the Blue” demonstration that had become a brawl between the Proud Boys and militias on one side and anti-fascist counterprotesters on the other. Earlier that week, Nelson, a man in his late 20s who was fond of discussing his “Anglo heritage,” had invited me to join him to watch what he assumed would be violent clashes. “Portland has canceled all parades…

EARLY IN MY COLLEGE TEACHING CAREER, upon sharing an incidental detail of my biography—I was raised primarily by a single mother who worked as a home health aide—a colleague could barely hide her surprise: “You were raised by a single mom?” Yes, a tenured professor of history at Georgetown University was raised by a single mother. Like the few Americans who have experienced upward class mobility, I was able to find ways to cosplay middle-class status along the way. I learned how to fill out scholarship applications before I acquired a driver’s license. I budgeted my babysitting wages to cover school clothes and bus fare. I learned not to discuss too many details about my home life in front of people who were not like us. Today, my mother bristles…