Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i The Nation

RETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES IN JUNE 1951 after two years in Europe, I.F. Stone—The Nation’s former Washington correspondent—couldn’t help noticing that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” was rapidly becoming “the land of the belly-crawler and the home of the fearful.” Stone himself had good reason to be nervous. Though Joseph McCarthy had barely launched his eponymous “ism” under President Harry Truman (who’d issued his infamous Loyalty Order in 1947), the American Inquisition was already in full cry. Witch hunts targeting communists, homosexuals, and fellow travelers claimed ever more careers—and lives. Sailing into New York Harbor with his wife and children, Stone thought, “Oh boy! Here’s where I lose my passport.” Instead, the customs official offered him a warm “Zie gur gezint!” (Go…

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP SIGNED AN EXECutive order on March 20 stating his intentions to “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all,” he was doing more than implementing the standard DOGE agenda of cluelessly targeting phantom government waste. The Department of Education, which Congress created in 1979, represents a key fulcrum in the right-wing theology of culture warfare. That’s why dismantling most key functions of the department is a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s wrecking-ball tour through the administrative state: the agenda of publicly funded education has always been anathema to the modern conservative movement. Like the other agency death sentences issued by the second Trump administration—targeting such bêtes noires of the right as the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the…

THE CENSORSHIP OF RADICAL VOICES IS AN OLD STORY that’s become much more dire—and current—with the detention by immigration agents on March 8 of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student activist and permanent resident of the United States who has been at the forefront of protests at Columbia University against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. In a statement to The Free Press about the case, a Trump administration official said, “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” Rather, the official continued, Khalil’s activism was “mobilizing support for Hamas” in addition to being antisemitic and “hence, [is] contrary to the interests of the U.S.” This claim is both factually false and legally terrifying. There’s absolutely no evidence that Khalil is pro-Hamas or antisemitic. But it is even more disturbing…

ROSALIA MANUEL HAD WORKED for McDonald’s for more than 20 years when she was suddenly fired in 2022. Until then, she had been considered “the best employee,” she said, and had worked her way up to shift manager at a location in Saratoga, California. It was a role she took seriously. That March, after a coworker confided to her that a different shift manager had been following her around, making suggestive comments, and coming on to her, Manuel reported the behavior to the store manager above her. Manuel had never been trained on how to respond to incidents of sexual harassment, she said, but she felt that it was her responsibility to do something. The shift manager who had been harassing Manuel’s coworker never appeared to receive any discipline. Instead,…

It’s arguably a waste of time to read Donald Trump’s books. In the first place, he didn’t write them; they weren’t even written by the same ghostwriter. His first three books, 1987’s The Art of the Deal, 1990’s Surviving at the Top (republished a year later as The Art of Survival, when Trump’s position could no longer be described as “at the top”), and 1997’s The Art of the Comeback, have three different authors standing in for the Donald: Tony Schwartz, Charles Leerhsen, and Kate Bohner. Trump is also an inveterate liar, so there’s not much point in parsing the details of some triumphant deal as he recounts them: They have inevitably been altered to reflect favorably on him, so to try to figure out where he’s fudging is to…

ONE SUMMER NIGHT IN THE EARLY 1960S, AT A RALLY IN New York City, the great newspaper columnist Murray Kempton admitted to an audience full of battered old Reds that while America had not been kind to them, it was lucky to have had them. My mother turned to me and said, “He’s the only Cold War liberal who’s had the courage to apologize.” Years later, in 1977, I had occasion to appreciate Kempton’s particular brand of courage anew. I had published an oral history called The Romance of American Communism, which had been mercilessly attacked by intellectual heavyweights to the left and to the right. When a panel was convened to discuss the book, I was fearful of attending the event, but then Kempton called to ask if he…

THE INSTITUTIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY, THE ORGANIZATIONS AND PRACTICES that give democracy its substance, are crumbling. The word of the day is capitulation. It’s astounding how fast the liberal order is collapsing. Those charged with its preservation are bowing to the will of a would-be king and a tech lord who is so empowered by his billions that laws and norms don’t apply to him. This suggests that the rot—the disbelief in the system, the sense that it serves little more than the personal ends of power and privilege—is deep and long-standing. The blame does not rest solely on Trump and Musk. They announced their intentions. More concerning is the rapid capitulation to their demands. The absence of a will to fight, to defend the institutions of liberal democracy, is…

THE MESSAGES STARTED APPEARING ON MY PHONE as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend—a friend—threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching. The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle…

FOR YEARS, I’VE RESISTED THE IDEA THAT FEMINISM was in retreat. Sure, there are always trend stories to be written about backlash fads—“trad wives,” for instance, the latest variation on women who achieve fame and fortune by telling other women to stay at home. But I always thought women’s liberation was unstoppable, however slow the progress might seem at any given moment. Women are too essential to the modern economy to park them back in the kitchen. Look at how far women have come in education, political representation, the mainstreaming of once marginal and radical feminist views. Look at how many women can support themselves and the effect of that on marriage. Look at #MeToo. Right. Look at #MeToo. Oh, brother. We now have an adjudicated sexual abuser, self-professed pussy…

Although Imani Perry has long chronicled Black life with an expansive eye, her writings since 2018 have covered an especially broad array of subjects, including a biography of Lorraine Hansberry, a history of the Black national anthem, and a Black feminist theory of patriarchy. Her 2019 book Breathe ruminated on the relationship between Blackness, childhood, and American governance, while her 2022 book South to America combined reportage and cultural criticism in a profile of the region that she called “the soul of the nation.” Perry’s latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, tracks the relationship between Black people and the color blue, from the early modern cultivation of indigo in Africa to enslaved people planting periwinkles in lieu of headstones, to the musical…

IF YOU WENT TO A TRENDY RESTAURANT IN SÃO PAULO IN 2021 OR 2022, you were likely to see the red hat. If you went to Mamba Negra, the underground rave with DJs visiting from Berlin, or to enough art gallery openings—in short, if you hung around the country’s progressive cultural elite—you were likely to see the red hat. The hat in question is a scarlet baseball cap depicting a man and a woman emerging from a green map of Brazil. The man raises a machete high above his head—ready to tend to the crops or, if you prefer, to go to battle. The image has been the logo of Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), known in English as the Landless Workers’ Movement, since shortly after its…

SHANETTE WILLIAMS SAT PATIENTLY ON THE STAGE OF AN AUDITORIUM in Austin, Texas, staring at the photograph of her daughter Amber that was resting in her lap. The photo appeared on the front of a rose-dappled pamphlet, below the words “Celebration of Life” and “September 16, 1993–August 19, 2022.” Occasionally, Williams looked up, out past the audience of 200 or in the direction of the other women who shared the stage with her, each recounting the horrors they had experienced under new, extreme abortion bans. Then it was Williams’s turn to speak. “Good morning, everyone,” she said. “My name is Shanette.” On August 19, 2022, she began, clutching the pamphlet, she received a phone call that her daughter was in the hospital. Alarmed, Williams dropped everything and headed to the…

ACALLARD’S OPEN SOCRATES IS LIKE MANY WORKS of philosophy: It is addressed to a certain kind of skeptic. Most philosophical works are addressed to skeptics, but they tend to be philosophical skeptics—the metaphysician who doesn’t find arguments for the existence of the external world convincing, the philosopher of knowledge who isn’t quite sure our hunches count as “knowledge,” the moral philosopher who hears talk of “normativity” and can’t shake the mental image of a cop barking orders ultimately backed by violence rather than deep moral truth. Those skeptics are, at movable by philosophical argument, or bottom, in on it: They are moved and so we imagine. Callard’s book is addressed to a different kind of skeptic: the one skeptical of the philosophical life. As she writes in the introduction, even…

THE PREMISE OF ROT, PADRAIC X. SCANLAN’S COMPREhensive, elegantly written, and heartbreaking account of what was surely the most terrible catastrophe to befall Ireland in the modern era, is succinctly expressed in a passage from the book’s epilogue: “The structures that built and justified British imperial power in Ireland meant that in 1845”—the first year of the Great Famine—“the leaders of the United Kingdom could find no other way to explain the worst subsistence crisis in the new country’s short history than a definitive lack of civilisation among the Irish. The empire could conceive of no other useful tools to meet the crisis than the principles of the free market and the workhouse.” It was Catholic Ireland’s misfortune—one of her misfortunes, in the middle of the 19th century—to be shackled…

INTRODUCING HIS NEW FILM, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, before its screening at the New York Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar took a moment to express his gratitude to Sigrid Nunez, the author of the novel What Are You Going Through, on which the film is based. “Sigrid,” he intoned with comic despair, “I have been unfaithful to you.” But when it comes to a film adaptation, is there a distinction between love and fidelity? And, if so, which is more important in the end? Two very different adaptations of Nunez’s novels—Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, based on the novel of the same name and now released for a general audience in the United States—demonstrate both the risks and rewards of translating the written…

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS SNATCHED OFF THE STREETS and spirited away by plainclothes agents of the state. So-called “enemy aliens” shipped to a Central American prison with no semblance of due process. AI-fueled witch hunts against dissidents. This is life under Donald Trump’s immigration regime. The sterile language of the federal immigration bureaucracy fails to meet the urgency of the moment. Instead, the words that come to mind are evocative of authoritarian governments: kidnappings, abductions, disappearances. Trump’s justifications for these depredations are no less alarming. The students abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, we’re told, are supporters of terrorism whose presence in the country threatens US foreign policy interests. The Venezuelan migrants flown to a brutal Salvadoran prison in blatant defiance of a judicial order, Trump assures us, are vicious gang members…

FOR MOST OF THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY, seeing Donald Trump and JD Vance gaslight Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful to the United States felt like we were bursting an aneurysm. But for champions of cartoonish masculinity like the disgraced Australian American city councilor–cum–Trump-approved hype boy Nick Adams, it was deeply gratifying. As Adams wrote on Substack: What we saw was a glimpse of robust masculine diplomacy on display before the world. For decades, our weak and feminized leaders have talked in robotic and bureaucratic tones that might get you invited to a baby shower in Santa Monica but do not achieve the laying down of arms on the field of battle. The decades-long partisan gender gap has left Democrats vulnerable to this kind of sexist backlash. Not unrelatedly,…

2K Number of Department of Education (DOE) workers slated for layoffs by the Trump administration 53 Number of universities being investigated over so-called race-based restrictions $175M Amount of the University of Pennsylvania’s federal funding canceled by the Trump administration because the school allowed a trans student to compete in women’s athletics in 2022 $150B Amount of DOE funding that will be affected because Trump moved key functions of the department to other agencies $1.6T Amount of the federal student loan portfolio Trump seeks to move from the DOE to the Small Business Administration…

iF DEMOCRATS ARE SERIOUS ABOUT LEARNING FROM KAMAla Harris’s defeat, they should start by rejecting every election postmortem blaming “wokeness” for her loss. Ignore party grandee James Carville’s lashing out at what he derisively mislabeled as the Democrats’ “identity shit.” Print out—then soak in gasoline and set aflame—the memo by Seth London, adviser to rich Democratic donors, demanding a “complete rejection of race-and-group-based identity politics” in favor of “a politics centered on delivering the American dream through simple, concrete action.” What, with all due respect, the fuck are these people talking about? Harris already ran the “un-woke” campaign her critics wanted. Her downplaying of race and gender was so pronounced, it became a theme of campaign reporting. She bent over backwards to court “Cheney Republicans” and other supposed swing voters.…

I forget how to render myselfin attachment to the world. Taking a selfie in the hospital mirrorin case I, you know, die.A final photograph of mebeing painfully morose. I admit I got really corny this timeabout my body being a vessel.You got me, God. I thoughtyou were serious. Like, I was really about tokit out that boat,put a uterus in my uterusjust to have an extra one for show. Landlocked nowin the high grass of deathwalled in by the panic of cicadas I let rain trample me flatas a cluster of ditch lilieswhile I breathe inthe recommended exhaust. Anesthesia sloughs off my skinso a forge of white heatcan shine up my skeleton,making me new. As that fucker Ezra Pound insisted. Show me violenceand suddenly I’m all aesthetic. Here’s that pain…

THE FIRST TIME I FELT BETRAYED WAS WHEN I WAS 11. The culprit: my younger sister. The secret she had divulged: the unspeakable act of devouring sweets—part of a litany of processed foods my mother had forbidden us to eat. One day, I gathered some coins that my aunts had given me and ventured on my own to the corner store to get what I was entitled to: low-grade chocolate with nuts, heavily sugared gummies, and chocolate bars with caramel. Everything appeared to be going as planned. After purchasing the contraband, I went home and made a fatal mistake: I shared them with my sister. As we sat there in a state of sugary exhaustion, my mother discovered us, grew suspicious, and quickly found the evidence of our transgression—a candy…