Tabla de contenidos para September 18/25, 2023 en The Nation

THE AMERICAN RIGHT IS SINGING A NEW TUNE, AND IT’S THE BREAKOUT COUNTRY song “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony: “These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control.” After going viral on social media, the song stormed to the top of Apple’s download list. Its lyrics align perfectly with the Trumpian indictment of deep-state persecution targeting a forgotten working class: “Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do.” The sentiment captured the imagination of the self-styled “populist” leaders of the right and migrated immediately into the movement mainstream. At the first GOP debate, Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum used a clip from…

IN APRIL 2022, THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON Climate Change issued the sort of warning that would galvanize a sane society into historic action. Unless greenhouse gas emissions cease rising by 2025, the IPCC found, humanity will not be able to limit the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which the worst ravages of climate change might still be avoided—though not all of them, just the most catastrophic. The choice implied by the IPCC was between a globe-spanning initiative to halve emissions by 2030, thereby giving us a chance of remaining within the 1.5˚C threshold, or a 21st century defined by an increasingly uninhabitable world. Drastic as that choice is, the IPCC made clear that a path out of civilizational disaster is doable. The emissions reductions…

80 Number of active large wildfires in the United States, as of August 30 40k Average number of wildfires per year in the US between 2013 and 2022 5.1M Average number of acres burned in wildfires per year during that period $700 Amount of aid President Biden approved for each household displaced by the fires in Maui 115 Number of people killed by the Lahaina wildfire, as of August 30 31 Number of consecutive days Phoenix had a temperature of at least 110°F in June and July—a new record 147 Number of people in five Western US counties who died from extreme heat this summer…

At around 3:30 am on the morning of August 19, dozens of police officers and plainclothes operatives stormed the Islamabad residence of the Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist Imaan Mazari. They dismantled the CCTV system, broke down the front door, took custody of Imaan in front of her recently widowed mother, the former human rights minister, and dragged her into the back of a car. Two days earlier, Imaan had addressed a rally in Islamabad organized by the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), which advocates for the rights of ethnic Pashtuns, who make up around 20 percent of Pakistan’s population. She openly accused Pakistan’s powerful military establishment of sponsoring terrorism. “The real terrorists are the ones sitting in GHQ,” she told the crowd, referring to the Pakistan Army’s command center…

RACHEL STARTED WORKING AS A FLIGHT ATTENDANT WHEN SHE was 24. She wanted to do something fun before she figured out what career to pursue. But despite getting degrees in the years since, she still works as a flight attendant at United. “I just don’t think I could do a 9-to-5 job,” said Rachel (a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation). Fourteen years later, at 38, she gave birth to a daughter. United allowed her to go on unpaid leave and to keep her health benefits for 90 days, then forced her onto COBRA. Although Rachel had paid her bills ahead of time and put some money into savings, her financial buffer quickly ran out. She returned to work when her daughter was about 4 months old. Rachel was determined…

ESTABLISHED IN 1791 AS THE EXCLUSIVE ZONE WHERE Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire, the Pale of Settlement was a giant ghetto. Jews in the Pale were largely not allowed to own land or to farm. They were, for the most part, restricted to a set of villages and to a limited number of occupations. Poverty was a constant fact of life. Any hope of escaping it remained elusive. Pale Jews were vulnerable to spontaneously instituted laws and to outbursts of violence by their Slavic neighbors. When they could, many fled in droves to Western Europe, North America, and anywhere that would have them. And yet, for millions upon millions of others, the Pale of Settlement was home and it contained within its boundaries their history. Beyond…

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, TWO OP-EDS APPEARED IN The Boston Globe—one by President Biden’s former Covid czar, Ashish Jha, and the other by Jerome Adams, President Trump’s surgeon general. The occasion was the clear increase in Covid-19 cases this summer. Jha, who is back at his old gig as the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, made a case for, in his words, “ignoring” Covid. This is an old refrain of his by now: We have the tools. If you’re vaccinated and have access to Paxlovid, why worry? Jha briefly acknowledged that some people may be more vulnerable, but apart from that, he played his biggest hit: Don’t worry, be happy. It’s what got him to the White House, and he’s not changing his tune now. It fell…

“THE CRITICAL EDGE OF 1963 WAS BLUNTED IN THE LEGISLATION of 1964, as the causes of both poverty and black unemployment were separated from the workings of the economy,” writes the historian Judith Stein in her book Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism, on the aftermath of the events at the peak of the civil rights movement. “Discussions of unemployment, underemployment, and low wages were replaced by discourses on inadequate motivation, education, and culture, factors limiting a person’s ability to take advantage of opportunity…. Manpower policies would focus on the bottom end of the labor market.” The discovery of poverty as a national problem in the late 1950s and early ’60s redefined economic inequality from a description of relative material circumstances to a cultural…

GENTRIFICATION, THE PROCESS OF LOCAL demographic change by which the lower-income residents of under-resourced neighborhoods are displaced by wealthier ones, is one of the most studied subjects in sociology, economics, and urbanism. Its bleak reality is irrefutable and cannot be accepted as merely neutral “economic development,” particularly as it contributes to a worsening housing crisis amid ongoing threats of a recession. But rather than understand gentrification as a systemic issue—a product of the real estate industry that hastens this project of displacement—the term has simply become an insult people throw around on Twitter or in community planning meetings at the often-white hipsters, students, or artists with more financial resources than those in the communities in which they are entering. Allow me to be blunt: It is a waste of time…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, WHEN I WAS 21 YEARS OLD, I FOUND MYSELF WORKING at one of America’s most notorious jails. I was interning for McKinsey & Company, the elite management consulting firm. We had been tasked with helping reduce violence at Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex. Multiple members of the team had seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was the youngest by a few years. When I arrived, McKinsey had been embedded at Rikers for nine months. Corruption, violence, and a reliance on torturous solitary confinement plagued the jail. One day, around a dozen of us met in a conference room to discuss the highest-profile recent victim of the inhumanity at Rikers: Kalief Browder. Browder had been held at Rikers for three years for…

ON NOVEMBER 3, 1791, IN WHAT TODAY IS western Ohio, some 1,400 US soldiers under Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair, accompanied by more than 100 wives, children, prostitutes, and other camp followers, stopped for the night on the banks of the Wabash River. The inept St. Clair failed to order his men to prepare any breastworks or defenses. The next morning, as they were cooking breakfast over their campfires, the troops were overwhelmed by a well-planned attack by roughly 1,000 Native Americans angry about the tide of newcomers invading their lands. Discipline collapsed, and only a few hundred soldiers managed to break out and flee. The battle left 657 troops dead and 271 wounded. It would be the greatest military defeat that Native Americans ever inflicted on the US Army.…

ON AUGUST 20 IN THE CENTRAL PLAZA OF THIS REGIONAL capital, hundreds cheer when Bernardo Arévalo, a professor turned anti-corruption politician, wins the country’s presidential election. Fireworks go off. A campaign volunteer grabs a microphone and cries, “Today is the beginning of Guatemala’s next Democratic Spring!” That’s a reference to Arévalo’s party, Movimiento Semilla, born during the “Guatemalan Spring” of 2015, when protesters ousted President Otto Pérez Molina for corruption. But it is also an invocation of Guatemala’s “Democratic Spring” of social democracy from 1944 to 1954. That period remains the lodestar of Guatemalan history—before a US-backed coup ousted President Jacobo Arbenz, ushering in a decades-long genocide of Indigenous Guatemalans and, more recently, governments marred by corruption and repression. Arévalo is the son of Juan José Arévalo, the country’s first…

FACTORIES CLOSING. SMALL TOWNS SHRINKING. Violence of all kinds. Teen pregnancy and early motherhood. You’ve probably read your share of articles about the decline of America’s so-called heartland. In 2015, Angus Deaton and Anne Case published an influential study showing that “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide were rising dramatically among non-college-educated white people. This trend coincided with a sharp decline in life expectancy, especially among middle-aged women. It was a wake-up call for anyone wedded to the idea of women’s steady, if slow, progress toward equality (although, since Dobbs, one wonders how many of those optimistic souls are left). Academic studies can only take us so far in showing us the complicated textures of lives lived. That’s what makes Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of…

This year, 11 states either created a state-level child tax credit or beefed up an existing one. Minnesota led the pack. It didn’t just establish a new, permanent credit; it now boasts the country’s most generous one, offering families who earn less than $35,000 as much as $1,750 a year for each child under the age of 17. These states are enacting a policy that has been an irrefutable success. In 2021, the country embarked on a remarkable, if short-lived, experiment in addressing child poverty. Democrats included a bigger federal child tax credit, to be paid out monthly to all low-income families, in the American Rescue Plan. President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law in March 2021, and starting in July of that year, eligible families received up to…

my friend’s got a pig heart in him.my friend’s got part of a pig’s heart,a piece, his heart’s part pig.the aortic valve is the dog-godguarding the tube blood runsthrough once it’s been scrubbedclean. one of two semilunarvalves which sounds like a partof a moon, a piece. my friend’sgot moons in him separatingthe two major atria. my friend’sfull of ballrooms, those darkvaulted ceilings. my friend’s a vegan.my friend’s a vegan with a pig heartthumping club music. my friendbelieves the pig in him is vegansince it eats what he eats,speaks when he speaks. the pigheart pulses in his chestlike a reflection of the moonin a puddle out behind the clubonce we’ve finished dancing.my friend takes drugs so his bodydoesn’t reject the organ. my friendtakes drugs so he can go ondancing. his pig…