Tabla de contenidos para October 16/23, 2023 en The Nation

TWO TYPES OF SHUTDOWNS HIT THE HEADLINES THIS WEEK. THE FIRST IS A nightmarish repeat: A handful of right-wing radicals in Congress is threatening to disrupt the lives of millions of federal workers and the millions of working-class Americans who rely on the services they provide by forcing a government shutdown. The other shutdowns, however, move in the opposite direction: everyday people using their organizations to bring strategic sectors of the economy to a standstill to demand a society that works for the people who generate its wealth. These strikes—like the just-settled Hollywood writers’ strike, which saw workers build supermajority unity and wield it to shift the balance of power—are the real answer to the hooligans in D.C. and the billionaires they represent, at the ballot box and in the…

THE TWIN SUPREME COURT RULINGS striking down race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions and student-debt cancellation unleashed a debate about higher education that fails to address the most dire crises affecting college students: affordability and access. Affirmative action and debt cancellation were Band-Aid interventions to redress the machinery of structural racism and inequality. Most college students attend institutions that accept most of their applicants, so affirmative action had minimal impact on them. The Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon estimated that at roughly 100 selective colleges that practiced race-conscious admissions, between 10,000 and 15,000 Black and Latino students who otherwise would not have been admitted received degrees each year. The debt cancellation program would have extended onetime relief to some 43 million borrowers, with 90 percent of the benefits going to people…

THIS FALL, AS WASHINGTON GEARED UP FOR THE recurring spectacle of another prospective shutdown of the federal government, many Americans were experiencing a different shutdown—one already in its final stages. With the retirement of the $52 billion childcare stabilization program at the end of September, the last vestiges of the Covid-era welfare state have been expunged. Earlier casualties of America’s reversion to the old, austerian normal included the wildly popular and effective child tax credit, which netted more than $160 billion in annual tax savings for working families during the pandemic, as well as expanded Medicaid and SNAP benefits that helped to ensure that ordinary Americans could reliably access food, shelter, and healthcare during the economic perils of the lockdown. Meanwhile, during the debt-ceiling negotiations this past spring, the Biden…

LEON WIESELTIER HAS BEEN BURNED BY THE TECH world twice. In 2012, three decades into his tenure as The New Republic’s literary editor, Wieseltier was reportedly “giddy” after the century-old, perpetually unprofitable magazine was acquired by Chris Hughes, a 28-year-old cofounder of Facebook. Two years later, Hughes installed a Silicon Valley veteran who promised to “break stuff” as the magazine’s chief executive and then ousted TNR’s editor, Franklin Foer, prompting the abrupt resignation of most of the editorial staff, Wieseltier included. In 2015, Wieseltier got to work on a new venture, a quarterly magazine called Idea, to be financed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But in 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Wieseltier was accused of having sexually harassed female employees at…

IN THE DESERT OF SAUDI ARABIA, BETWEEN JORDAN and the Red Sea, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is building a utopian eco-city called the Line, a cornerstone of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan to reduce its economic dependence on oil. The Line will be built along a 100-mile strip dedicated to carbon- and car-free living, powered by wind and solar and provided with fresh water by desalination. It will be made up of self-sufficient superblocks, each square with its own schools and shops. There are plans for vertical farming in greenhouses, high-speed trains, millions of trees, robot maids, and an autonomous legal system designed by investors. I learned about the Line from a friend whose brother-in-law, an ornithologist, had been hired by the mega-development project ostensibly to make sure that…

JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO COAST TO A SECOND TERM isn’t working. As the 2024 election season gears up, the Democratic establishment is lurching from complacency to panic. Everything was going according to plan: The Biden campaign had cleared the field of any serious challenger, eliminated debates, and greased the president’s path to the nomination. The only catch is that early polls suggest voters aren’t buying what the campaign is selling. Biden isn’t likely to withdraw, so it is imperative that progressives mobilize independently of the party to build the populist energy and message needed to drive fundamental change. Biden assumed he could run on a decent economy and a solid record of accomplishment. The threat posed by Donald Trump and the outrage over Republican efforts to outlaw abortion would help…

THERE ARE SIX NON-WHITE CANDIDATES VYING FOR the Republican presidential nomination, making the 2024 primary field the GOP’s most diverse yet. In an alternate universe, the moment might be heralded as a historic step toward repairing America’s broken promise of multiracial democracy and equality. But in our Trumpian reality, where the Grand Old Party is best understood as a reactionary white grievance movement—eh, not so much. Non-white Republican candidates know that, to win, they need the support of Donald Trump’s 2020 voters. The same voters who, a July Yahoo News/YouGov poll found, are twice as likely to see racism against whites as a bigger problem than anti-Black racism. Eighty-four percent, a previous study showed, worry that “discrimination against whites” will increase in the coming years. The candidates have probably seen…

18% Rise in the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States between August 27 and September 9 4,679 Average daily Covid hospitalizations as of September 9 $62 Median price for a PCR Covid test $600M Amount the Biden administration is planning to spend on sending free Covid tests to households through the US Postal Service once again 153M Number of updated Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses distributed in the US as of September 13 23.4M Number of non-elderly uninsured adults who are not guaranteed free access to the CDC-recommended updated vaccines…

THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED States will get back to work on October 2. As is now tradition, the 2023–24 term will give the Republican-appointed justices on the court plenty of opportunities to revoke rights, promote gun violence, and make the world safe for wealthy white men and nobody else. As is now also tradition, the elected branches of government—as well as the Democratic Party—will do nothing to stop those six conservative justices from imposing their far-right cultural agenda upon us all. The upshot is that this Supreme Court term will not be a debate between conservative and liberal legal viewpoints. (There are no liberal viewpoints that have any chance of prevailing in the face of the court’s conservative supermajority.) Instead, this term will be about which flavor of…

THE DAY BEFORE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE coup that ousted Salvador Allende, I watched a father and his young daughter sitting quietly at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. They looked solemnly at the massive wall before them, with its hundreds of portraits of people killed or disappeared by the state during Chile’s military dictatorship. Nearby tables invited kids to draw—to trace their hands and write messages in the paper palms. In wobbly penmanship, the letters floating at different heights, one drawing read: “Justice! Members of my family were tortured”—something I, too, learned as a child. I spent the 50th anniversary of the coup crisscrossing Santiago, in protest and in vigil, with my mom and a caravan of other Brazilian former exiles. Like the children, we were here…

NO NEW YORKER IN THEIR RIGHT MIND—ESPECIALLY one who vividly remembers the horror of 9/11—would want to visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. But on a cloudless day shortly after the 22nd anniversary of the attacks, I took leave of my senses and descended into trauma, hate, and fear. It was a literal descent: The museum is an escalator ride beneath what was Ground Zero, the wreckage of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. My Virgils for this endeavor were two New Yorkers who are trying to push the museum to become something more than an atrocity exhibition. There was Steven Rosenbaum, a documentarian whose donation of the 500-hour CameraPlanet 9/11 archive made him and his wife, Pamela Yoder, the largest contributors of video to the museum;…

Island Records Gene Seymour’s review of Saxophone Colossus, Aidan Levy’s new biography of Sonny Rollins, concludes with what is best in jazz writing: the larger picture and how jazz fits into it [“What Jazz Is,” August 7/14]. I’ve followed Rollins’s career for at least 60 years, but Seymour filled in a lot of the gaps and came up with some surprises for me. The biggest was that Rollins’s parents were both from the “American” Virgin Islands (by which he means the US Virgin Islands, since the British Virgin Islands are also in America). I, too, am a Virgin Islander. I arrived in St. Thomas in 1979 and not long after made my way into the Music Man, Bill LaMotta’s store in Charlotte Amalie. There, I learned that the greatest song…

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Woefully unprepared for the world’s newest undressing, I hangtwo hands out the passenger while heavy clouds draw a knifealong the sky’s throat & the roads beg to be slid upon—death be damnedI ride shotgun in any machine that will hold my heart while it writhes like a snake pulled from its resting place, cursing the distance between a mouth & a targetshot/gun, named after who might sit close to someone who holds something precious& fire off a weapon to protect a person they did not love but could be convinced to kill in the name of& beneath the percussion of a finger’s quivering along a trigger’s vicious grin is something I believe to be not far from love. I am not a killer but there are thosewho I would kill…