newrepublic--2020-05-19--Ronan Farrow Is Not a “Resistance” Journalist

In his latest column in The New York Times , Ben Smith has made a bold allegation against perhaps the most famous investigative journalist in America .
Ronan Farrow ’ s reporting on sexual violence and related abuses of power , he writes , has sometimes failed to “ follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure.
” Smith raises questions about whether Farrow did the necessary legwork— “ the painstaking task of tracking down friends and neighbors a traumatized victim may have confided in soon after the assault , to see if their accounts align with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it more—or less—weight ” —to confirm two women ’ s allegations of sexual assault ( one against Harvey Weinstein , the other against Matt Lauer ) .
And he uses these examples—which Farrow has contested , and so have others involved in Farrow ’ s reporting at The New Yorker—to bolster his overarching allegation that Farrow writes to tell a convincing story , not necessarily to tell you what he knows with certainty .
“ He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic—with unmistakable heroes and villains—and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Smith writes .
But this lack of precision , at least in Smith ’ s view , is about more than just Farrow : “ His work , though , reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump : That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices , the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s reporting has landed so forcefully in part because the media is in the midst of renegotiating its relationship to movements like # MeToo .
That also includes a sincere reevaluation of how we report on rape .
What , for instance , constitutes enough “ corroboration ” to go to print ?
After all , Smith isn ’ t saying Farrow got the story wrong ; he ’ s claiming that Farrow wasn ’ t forthcoming about his efforts to confirm what two people knew about two women ’ s allegations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on sexual assault is a live debate , and it extends beyond Farrow .
That shouldn ’ t get lost in debating Farrow ’ s alleged sins of journalism .
Though Smith may have meant “ the resistance ” more broadly , it is hard to characterize Farrow ’ s work as aligned with anti-Trumpism : Of the investigations that produced the greatest impact , Farrow ’ s subjects were liberal Democrats .
In March , Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years for committing a first-degree criminal sex act and third-degree rape .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ resigned three hours after the publication of Farrow ’ s story with Jane Mayer , in which four women said he physically abused them .
Weinstein and Schneiderman were supporters of Trump ’ s former opponent , current resistance heroine Hillary Rodham Clinton .
It may feel now , nearly three years later , that Weinstein was a “ public figure most disliked by the loudest voices , ” but at the time , he was still defended as a kingmaker , even if he had a bad “ temper.
” Schneiderman ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his professed commitment to challenging sexual violence .
He had sued the Weinstein Company for alleged complicity in Weinstein ’ s harassment and abuse , and he called the # MeToo movement a “ critical national reckoning .
”

Smith doesn’t address this directly, but what are currently regarded as the rules of reporting on rape can work against the person coming forward. As Vox reporter Laura McGann described it recently, the publication of such stories requires “extraordinary amounts of evidence,” and “not just consistent corroboration but oftentimes multiple stories, stacked on top of each other.” An allegation may be true, but that’s not enough to get to publication. And what’s regarded as corroboration can be subjective. Is there a specific number of people that someone should have shared their story with contemporaneously? How much of that story did someone have to reveal to them? How much can their story and their witnesses’ stories change over time? There is not—and it is difficult to imagine how there would be—an industry-wide standard for this. In fact, these kinds of rules for reporting on sexual violence have been the subject of much debate since the Weinstein stories in The New Yorker and The New York Times. There is a growing acceptance, among some journalists, that reporting on sexual violence means negotiating three sometimes competing things: the demands of rigorous investigative work, the difficulty of producing airtight accounts of trauma that subjects may have minimized at the time as a way to cope and move on, and the needs and realities of those subjects in the face of such a story being published.
Investigative journalism’s roots are partly in stories about sex, the law, and abuses of power. Men collecting what they considered evidence of sexual violence against women helped define muckraking, as Gretchen Soderlund details in her book, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917. These men, like George Kibbe Turner at McClure’s, seized national attention and inspired high-profile prosecutions with their exposés of the allegedly new phenomenon that Progessive Era reformers called “white slavery”—prostitution. They were “new journalism” when it actually was new, the first decade of the twentieth century, the first time there was a national media in the United States. And their work, far from being received by all as unadulterated journalistic truth, kicked off intense debate, including in the pages of The New York Times.
At first, writes Soderlund, the paper shied away from following up on Turner’s popular stories of girls sold into brothels—muckraking was not their style—until a new district attorney launched an undercover investigation through which the paper could “discover” the story itself (“White Slave Traffic Shown to Be Real,” April 30, 1910). The Times faithfully covered the ensuing trial, but when it found that the women had largely sold sex of their own accord, the paper looked as untrustworthy as the muckrakers. “The public relations solution to this predicament,” Soderlund writes, “was to portray the Times as a detached observer and recorder of a story that was in the midst of unraveling, while projecting a retrospective delight that ‘reason’ had prevailed over anecdotal sensationalism.” The story was no longer about women who were or weren’t forced into brothels but about which reporters ought to be believed—the Timesman or those muckrakers who led their readers astray. The paper’s “detached observer” role was cemented.


newrepublic--2020-05-19--Rebuilding Retirement After the Pandemic

With more than 30 million people in the United States currently out of a job , it ’ s not terribly difficult to imagine not working .
But the coronavirus-related economic shocks have lately made it hard to envision exiting the workforce with much dignity .
Even retirement , which was once taken for granted as the sure ( if distant ) means by which we ’ d all seamlessly transition from our years of labor to our years of rest , now seems like a shakier promise than ever before with the economy in ruins .
At the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found that the average 401 ( k ) balance had fallen by nearly 20 percent as a result of the Covid-induced financial crash ; around the same time , Marketwatch reported that some employers had started suspending 401 ( k ) matches for employees .
And just last Sunday , one Washington think tank speculated that Social Security could be insolvent as soon as 2030 , thanks to the recent shock of mass unemployment on the payroll taxes used to fund the program .
As worrying as these blows to the country ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only the most recent assaults on an already inadequate , makeshift arrangement that ’ s been sliding deeper into crisis for years , if not decades .
Retirement , for the majority of people , will be unattainable if nothing changes .
A 2016 report from the Economic Policy Institute , for instance , found that nearly half of prime working-age households ( that is , households headed by someone between the ages of 32 and 61 ) lacked a retirement savings account like a 401 ( k ) .
According to one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Reserve , a quarter of all Americans—including 13 percent of people over 60—had nothing saved for retirement whatsoever .
And even for those with funds set aside for the so-called golden years , they ’ re often not enough : Nearly half of respondents in a 2018 Gallup poll said they were expecting to run out of money in retirement .
“ If we do nothing in the next 12 years , 40 % of middle-class older workers will be poor and near poor elders , ” economist Teresa Ghilarducci wrote last year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is in such nightmarish condition now is the rise of individual contribution plans such as 401 ( k ) accounts and IRAs , which have largely supplanted the type of employer pensions that once funded the retirements of both public and private sector workers .
If you entered the workforce after the mid-1980s , chances are a 401 ( k ) is the only retirement option you ’ ve ever known , yet they were never meant to be a primary method of funding retirement .
The 401 ( k ) was originally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( as its inelegant name suggests ) that allowed high-earning professionals to defer taxes on bonuses and other compensation , which ended up spawning a much cheaper alternative to traditional pensions for employers .
Early champions of 401 ( k ) s as retirement savings vehicles pointed to how much those investments could grow with the market .
But there was an obvious flip side to that lucrative promise : It also exposed your savings to the depredations of the market ’ s downturns .
Now , as The Wall Street Journal reports @ @ @ @ @ @ @ k ) s are feeling a pinch of regret .
Herbert Whitehouse , an executive who championed 401 ( k ) s at Johnson & Johnson in the 1980s , told the Journal that he ’ d had to delay his retirement after the 2008 financial crash took a huge bite out of his retirement savings .
In addition to being vulnerable to the volatility of the market , 401 ( k ) s are often subject to high fees by the investment firms that manage them , often unbeknownst to account holders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Whether the stock market goes up , down or sideways , the financial services sector makes out when it comes to your retirement accounts .
”

But if all that seems bleak (and it is), it’s also worth recalling that we have one ready-made solution to America’s retirement needs in the form of Social Security, which, as it happens, has been the only reliable pillar of retirement in the U.S. since its creation. Social Security, a component of the New Deal, was the answer to the retirement crisis provoked by the Great Depression. As journalist Rachel Cohen wrote for The New Republic, private pensions—established a few decades prior as a concession by capitalists to stave off public criticism and worker revolt over aging manual laborers battered by overwork—collapsed during the Depression, and the federal government intervened accordingly. “Observing the decimation of millions of dollars in life savings,” Cohen wrote, “the federal government recognized that it needed to step in, and created the Social Security Act of 1935.” Though Social Security payments alone aren’t enough to sustain most aging households, the Census Bureau has estimated that a majority of seniors today would be living in poverty without them.
While it’s true that Social Security will swiftly run dry if left untended, legislators such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have floated commonsense proposals to shore up and expand the program over the next few years. (One such fix includes removing the payroll tax cap, which, in 2020, exempts income above $137,700—essentially a tax break for high earners at the expense of the program.) Social Security has also been the long-running target of various deficit hawks (including, at one point, the Democratic nominee for president), but among the general public—and particularly among the age group that both receives Social Security and turns out to vote—it’s such a popular program that threats to cut it reliably provoke a public backlash and a fresh reminder that the program remains “the third rail of American politics.”
There is, nevertheless, an opportunity at hand to address the looming retirement crisis and bolster the future of Social Security. Democratic legislators would be wise to seize it, particularly in an election year, when the vast majority of Americans are facing a future of economic uncertainty. The current volatility of both the stock market and the labor market is yet more evidence that the system of individual saving via 401(k)s won’t be enough. Here, in this fraught moment when we’re all caught between a worrisome public health crisis and the economic damage we’re enduring to lessen its impact, it can feel like an inopportune moment to look so far down the road and press for the kind of change that seems geared toward addressing a far-off future. But as the EPI’s Monique Morrissey told The New Republic, “Nothing that’s happening in this pandemic is a reason not to expand or rely more on Social Security.”


newrepublic--2020-05-19--The End of The Trip

The End of The Trip

Ten years ago , when the first installment of Michael Winterbottom ’ s The Trip was released , the “ bromance ” was near its peak .
The bromance featured dysfunctional men floundering in their love lives and careers and finding solace in each other .
These movies , epitomized by a string of megahits directed by Judd Apatow in the 2000s , portrayed men hanging onto childhood , with adulthood often represented by the expectations of women .
( Apatow ’ s directorial debut was The 40-Year-Old Virgin . )
The male friendship of the bromance was transcendent in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fantasy , exaggerating the bonds of friendship in the same way that romantic comedies obsessed over love .
The Trip movies are frequently tagged as bromances .
But can you have a buddy comedy if the two lead actors don ’ t even seem to like one another ?
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play versions of themselves , as they undertake culinary excursions to England , Italy , Spain , and , in the latest and supposedly final installment , Greece .
Nothing much happens in these movies .
Over the course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restaurant to restaurant , inn to inn , sometimes discussing art and history , but mostly doing impressions of other celebrities .
They also bicker , albeit in a way that is so passive-aggressive ( or , perhaps more accurately , so British ) that it barely registers as conflict .
There are crises along the way , and the scenery changes , but these four films are basically the same thing over and over : two guys eating fancy food and talking .
There is an unexpected poignancy to all this repetition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , although The Trip to Greece only has a dash of Coogan and Brydon doing their most famous bit , dueling impressions of Michael Caine .
( The Trip franchise has given a whole new meaning to the line “ You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off !
” ) And over so many hours of film , stretched out over a decade , their on-screen relationship has come far closer than other bromances in depicting what male friendship is really like .
Asked by Brydon early in The Trip @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Coogan replies , “ Uh , probably my seven Baftas , ” referring to the British entertainment awards that are a mashup of the Oscars and the Emmys .
“ For me , it would be my children , ” Brydon replies .
Coogan hits back : “ Well , you haven ’ t got any Baftas !
”

Ten years ago, when the first installment of Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip was released, the “bromance” was near its peak. The bromance featured dysfunctional men floundering in their love lives and careers and finding solace in each other. These movies, epitomized by a string of megahits directed by Judd Apatow in the 2000s, portrayed men hanging onto childhood, with adulthood often represented by the expectations of women. (Apatow’s directorial debut was The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) The male friendship of the bromance was transcendent in its authenticity. It was also a fantasy, exaggerating the bonds of friendship in the same way that romantic comedies obsessed over love.
The Trip movies are frequently tagged as bromances. But can you have a buddy comedy if the two lead actors don’t even seem to like one another? Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play versions of themselves, as they undertake culinary excursions to England, Italy, Spain, and, in the latest and supposedly final installment, Greece. Nothing much happens in these movies. Over the course of a week, they travel from restaurant to restaurant, inn to inn, sometimes discussing art and history, but mostly doing impressions of other celebrities. They also bicker, albeit in a way that is so passive-aggressive (or, perhaps more accurately, so British) that it barely registers as conflict. There are crises along the way, and the scenery changes, but these four films are basically the same thing over and over: two guys eating fancy food and talking.


Honky-Tonk Sonnet

Before cancer , I was a country .
Now— , I ’ m a fucking country Song : job gone @ @ @ @ @ diagnosed w/ Post-Traumatic Stress— I ’ m missing more organs Than a looted church .
@ @ @ @ @ been repossessed !
Know what I got left ?
2 years .
The lifespan Of @ @ @ @ @ wife ’ s therapist Tells me I can use this time to find Out who @ @ @ @ @ help me Jesus , I ’ ve wasted it , so/help me Jesus , I @ @ @ @ @ squeak .

Before cancer, I was a country.
Now—, I’m a fucking country
Song: job gone, house gone,
Wife diagnosed w/ Post-Traumatic Stress—
I’m missing more organs
Than a looted church.
Even my dog’s been repossessed!
Know what I got left?
2 years. The lifespan
Of an average rat. My wife’s therapist
Tells me I can use this time to find
Out who I really am. Lord help me Jesus,
I’ve wasted it, so/help me Jesus,
I know what I am: squeak.


newrepublic--2020-05-20--Robert Stone’s Bad Trips

Robert Stone’s Bad Trips

For the late , great novelist Robert Stone , modern American life could only be understood as a state of endless war .
Though his combat experience was brief—he was an 18-year-old radioman on a U.S. ship in Port Said when the French air force attacked Egypt in 1956—he was drawn to both military and ideological battle zones while researching his novels .
His visits to El Salvador shaped the dense , hallucinatory A Flag for Sunrise ( 1981 ) .
His trips to Israel and Gaza informed his longest and even more hallucinatory novel about Mideast political-religious conflicts , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after hanging out in Saigon with Vietnam correspondents like Gloria Emerson and Michael Herr , he produced his most absorbing and most wildly hallucinatory novel , Dog Soldiers ( 1974 ) .
The three most important words in Stone ’ s work ( and in his three best novels , just reissued by Library of America ) are war , Vietnam , and hallucinatory .
Losing in Vietnam , Stone argued , the United States lost any belief in its moral superiority .
As Stone wrote in his National Book Award acceptance speech @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ forced to rediscover one of the harshest and irremediable facts of life—that the universe belongs to the strong .
That weakness always fails ; strength prevails.
” His characters live with a profound sense of disillusionment .
“ We ’ re at a very primitive stage of mankind , ” argues one of the many covert intelligence ops who populate Flag .
“ Just pick up the Times on any given day and you ’ ve got a catalog of ape behavior .
Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.
” For Stone , who received his education from Roman Catholics in New York City , giving up on America was like giving up on God .
You might wish there was something out there , but you had to admit there was not .
Bereft of religious or moral authority , all America could believe in was its own power .
And power , as Stone ’ s characters keep finding , can only be expressed through violence and received in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a trap , ” Converse discovers in Dog Soldiers .
It leads anyone who thinks clearly about the world ’ s ritual abuses into a state of learned helplessness .
It is one end-of-times after another .
Stone ’ s was not an unusual writerly childhood in the 1930s , though it might seem unusual in the current MFA-driven publishing industry .
He was born in Brooklyn in 1937 , and by most accounts never knew his father .
( Though as Madison Smartt Bell notes in his appreciative , well-written biography @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s own accounts of his paternity were inconsistent.
” ) He spent much of the first 16 years of his life in a series of claustrophobic , one-room boardinghouses and apartments ; at one point , his living conditions were reported to child protection services .
His mother was a difficult , unpredictable woman , possibly schizophrenic or bipolar—conditions attributed , at different times , to Stone as well .
He got involved with gangs , sorted himself out slowly , and , like many writers from the wrong side of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right side through a love of books , reading , and writing .
At the age of 17 , he signed up for three years in the U.S. Navy .

Stone’s lifelong friendship with Kesey and his Pranksters (including Neal Cassady, the sociopathically inclined buddy of Jack Kerouac, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead) could create a misleading impression of him. While Kesey and Stone both liked to drink, party, and take whatever drug was coming down the pike, they were very different types of writers. Kesey took advantage of his literary celebrity to act out his anti-establishment passions in wide-open political clamor. Stone was a more diffident personality; he preferred the isolate daily discipline of writing his complex books. And whereas Kesey’s public performances eventually took over his career, Stone managed to stay on track. Even when he veered from one job to another, one drug to another, and one relationship to another, Stone always found a way into the next good novel, and the next one after that.
ROBERT STONE: DOG SOLDIERS, A FLAG FOR SUNRISE, OUTERBRIDGE REACH by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell Library of America, 1,233 pp., $45.00
It’s hard to think of an American writer who wrote as many singularly beautiful prose passages as Robert Stone, or who wrestled more strenuously with such large political landscapes. A Hall of Mirrors is structured around a couple in New Orleans who gradually come together and fall apart again. Rheinhardt and Geraldine have spent their lives drinking too much, loving the wrong people, and never learning what’s good for them; they simply go where the wind blows, and the wind blows hard. Like many Stone protagonists, Rheinhardt is an innately talented artist who can’t find a place in an America where art matters. In one early passage, he recalls playing the lead clarinet in Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, and the “terrible invincible unity” he felt in its concluding moments. “And as he and the strings came down together in the last lovely tremolo, he had thought—how beautiful, how beautiful I am!”
Like a priest who doesn’t believe in God, or an artist who can no longer make art, the typical Stone protagonist isn’t a hero so much as a failed effort to transcend the world’s unholy mess. And when they fail, they die or go mad. Like the movie star Lu Anne Bourgeois in Stone’s Hollywood-as-hell novel, Children of Light (1986), or Owen Browne in Outerbridge Reach (1992), they ultimately sail off the map altogether. Many Stone characters eventually realize that death and dissolution aren’t the worst that can happen to them. The worst is that they might lose their mind, and their mind’s ability to transport them to better places.


Is Baseball Safe?

Will the United States get a baseball season this year ?
Do we deserve one ?
What is at stake—economically , emotionally , mortally—in the effort to start up sports again ?
On Episode 8 of The Politics of Everything , hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to David Roth , a former editor of Deadspin and a frequent contributor to The New Republic , about the challenges and questionable wisdom of reopening sports in a country still battling a pandemic .
Later in the episode , Laura and Alex consider the plight of the New York City subway @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Given the MTA ’ s drastic budget shortfalls , it ’ s hard not to wonder whether New Yorkers will ever ride trains at night again .
What is the post-Covid future of public transit ?
• One of Alex Shepherd ’ s favorite things about South Korean baseball is that it isn ’ t beholden to the same “ oppressive dogmas ” as baseball in the United States : “ Bat flipping , for example , is frowned on as flashy and unsportsmanlike in America but celebrated in South Korea .
@

Will the United States get a baseball season this year? Do we deserve one? What is at stake—economically, emotionally, mortally—in the effort to start up sports again? On Episode 8 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to David Roth, a former editor of Deadspin and a frequent contributor to The New Republic, about the challenges and questionable wisdom of reopening sports in a country still battling a pandemic.
Later in the episode, Laura and Alex consider the plight of the New York City subway system, which recently suspended late-night service. Given the MTA’s drastic budget shortfalls, it’s hard not to wonder whether New Yorkers will ever ride trains at night again. What is the post-Covid future of public transit?


newrepublic--2020-05-20--Workers Deserve to Be Owners, Too

Workers Deserve to Be Owners, Too

On Sunday , The New York Times ran a story on the Democratic Party ’ s surging interest in big ideas to revive the economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic .
Democrats , The Times ’ Alexander Burns wrote , now hope to come to Washington in January ready to pass not only new coronavirus relief legislation , but climate and infrastructure bills “ far larger than they previously envisioned , ” as well as major new health care and worker protection bills .
“ Discussions are also underway , ” he added , “ about policies that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corporations to share more of their profits with workers.
” The piece goes some way towards filling out the picture offered by last week ’ s report by New York ’ s Gabriel Debenedetti that Biden is now “ planning an FDR-Size Presidency.
” If these reports are accurate , all of this is welcome news .
Businesses are folding up across the country and we ’ re on our way to Depression-level unemployment .
Many of those who remain employed in essential industries—workers already made vulnerable by low pay and the suppression @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without hazard pay , protective equipment , or sick leave .
By the time the economy recovers , they and even many Americans better off than them will have seen much of whatever wealth they had accumulated destroyed by the crisis , just as it was in the last recession .
Social welfare policy and worker protections can help ameliorate the situation , but anyone truly serious about remaking the American economy should examine an even bolder set of policy solutions .
Again , consider the situation now facing essential workers at our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ facilities , and elsewhere .
In these places , employees are being commanded , in many cases , to work in unsafe conditions for a pittance .
It would be ideal if those workers were able to do some commanding themselves .
With a real say in how their companies and workplaces are run , those workers could ensure the provision of gloves , hand sanitizer , masks , sick leave , and hazard pay on their own without having to beg or protest .
Early in the pandemic , General Electric workers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to demand the use of their plants and labor for the production of ventilators .
“ Instead of laying workers off , ” Carl Kennebrew of the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America said in an April press release , “ GE should be stepping up to the plate with us to build the ventilators this country needs.
” But what if workers at those plants had positions of real authority at the bodies within the company where such things are decided ?
What if those workers , in some meaningful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to begin with ?

The concept of a social wealth fund is already mainstream enough that Hillary Clinton considered running on one during her 2016 campaign, and she explained the idea in her recent memoir. “Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest basic income every year,” she wrote. “Besides cash in people’s pockets, it would also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves.” It went unmentioned in this year’s Democratic primary, but other proposals to expand the wealth and economic power of American workers were put forward. Bernie Sanders offered a plan that would have granted employees 45 percent of the board seats and 20 percent ownership at every publicly traded company and every corporation with at least $100 million in revenue or on its balance sheet. Elizabeth Warren, the first candidate to put out a co-determination plan, proposed having employees control 40 percent of the board seats at all companies with at least $1 billion in revenue.
There’s early evidence to suggest these proposals would be popular with the American people if Democrats leaned into them. Polling from YouGov commissioned by the think tank the Democracy Collaborative last year found that a majority of registered voters would support the creation of a federal social wealth fund, policies incentivizing the voluntary transfer of ownership stakes to employees, and even making companies with more than 250 employees grant those employees half of their stock over time—a proposal more radical than the ownership plan Sanders put forward.
It would likely come as a surprise to many of those voters that these ideas approach the core of what is meant by “democratic socialism,” which is best understood as a project to radically expand worker ownership and the democratic management of firms. “Under capitalism we are supposed to take for granted that a small, largely unaccountable group of corporate executives should make all fundamental decisions about the management of a company comprised of thousands of people,” a 2016 strategy document from the Democratic Socialists of America reads. “Under democratic socialism, this authoritarian system would be replaced with economic democracy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.”


newrepublic--2020-05-20--Donald Trump’s Never-Ending War on Numbers

At a public appearance in Pennsylvania last week , President Donald Trump offered some fresh insight into how he views coronavirus testing .
The country is still struggling to test for the virus at scale , which in turn is hampering our ability to return to anything resembling normal life before the pandemic .
To the president , however , the testing itself is the problem .
“ When you test , you have a case , ” Trump said .
“ When you test , you find something is wrong with people .
If we didn ’ t do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few cases.
” His claim drew the scorn of epidemiologists and anyone with a passing familiarity with infectious diseases .
At the same time , it offered a useful window into how the president understands the world around him .
After all , there ’ s a certain logic of sorts to his approach .
Testing is the only way to conclusively determine how many coronavirus cases are currently out there .
The goal , both for public health and public relations , is to have as few cases as possible .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there are no cases .
And if there are no cases , then there is no crisis .
This is a bewildering approach to a public health disaster , to say the least .
But it is an unsurprising one for Trump .
In his world , there are Good Numbers and Bad Numbers .
As president he wants to take credit for all sorts of Good Numbers : rises in the stock market , declines in unemployment , upticks in approval ratings , and so on .
At the same time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that might come his way .
He spent his entire adult life working in the private sector , where companies and fortunes can live or die based on numbers on sheets of paper .
Numbers form an intrinsic part of how he measures his own success and the success of others .
Trump is hardly the only figure in American politics to approach numbers with something less than scholarly detachment .
Every president wants to tout their accomplishments and minimize their shortcomings , especially when numbers are involved .
What sets Trump apart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he wields these numbers and his perpetual willingness to manipulate them to his own ends .
All of those numbers are both the greatest possible source of personal validation—and the most dangerous threat to it .

The elasticity of those “Trump numbers” speaks to a deeper truth about the president’s relationship with numerals. In a newsletter last month, my colleague Katie McDonough noted how most Americans, including herself, experience money on a fundamentally different level than the wealthiest billionaires. “Money, as I understood it then and still do now, was both real and not real,” she wrote after coming across notebooks of budgets that she used to write for herself. “The expense lists are the real kind of money. Jeff Bezos is the fake kind, which is to say that there’s a certain level of wealth or number on a spreadsheet that’s more an idea than anything else.”
Trump also seems to understand that numbers are both real and not real. Figures and statistics can reflect reality, but they can never fully capture its substance. The president may not have Bezos-level wealth, but it’s clear that he lives at a level where the exact numbers don’t really matter on a day-to-day level. By the mid-1990s, Trump had to file for corporate bankruptcy multiple times over his Atlantic City casinos, which were saddled with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. As part of a deal with bankers in 1990, he agreed to keep his personal spending to a miserly $450,000 a month.
Despite the brush with financial ruin, Trump himself never filed for personal bankruptcy, and he emerged from the process without losing his gilded Manhattan penthouse or the bulk of his business empire. The impact was all too real for some of his creditors and contractors he couldn’t repay. But for Trump, the effect was mainly numerical. It helped that, behind the scenes, he had received more than $400 million over the years from his parents, in what The New York Times described in 2018 as an array of “dubious tax schemes” and “instances of outright fraud.” For some people, there are always more numbers out there.


newrepublic--2020-05-20--When Will We Grieve the Covid Dead?

When Will We Grieve the Covid Dead?

In the United States , we measure weight in pounds , distance in miles , and catastrophic losses in 9/11s .
At press time , Covid-19 had claimed 88,754 victims in the U.S. , a number that will surely be greater by the time you read this sentence .
By our all-American metric , that ’ s nearly thirty 9/11s .
We have , by far , the greatest number of Covid fatalities in the world .
As we are so fond of chanting at the sporting events we won ’ t be attending en masse again before 2022 : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deaths are gutting friend groups , hollowing out families , and leveling communities , each individual loss producing a blast radius of pain , trauma , and despair .
With nearly 90,000 dead , the total number of Americans grieving at this moment is vast .
And yet we have done nothing , as a nation , to mourn alongside each other .
Why has there been no collective national remembrance for our Covid dead ?
Where ’ s the official memorial service for a country united by grief , eulogized by our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tribute , the crowdsourced In Memoriam scroll , the synchronized virtual vigil ?
Where is the roll call of names each morning or night , read by some person in a position of authority , to signal to the rest of us that these individuals are not mere statistics , that their lives had innate dignity and worth ?
The absence feels especially profound given our inability to do what we ’ d ordinarily do after a death : gather with our surviving loved ones and comfort one another in person .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any shared remembrance is the obituary section , which the smattering of newspapers still standing are doing their best to deliver .
Our Covid dead don ’ t just die .
They disappear .

The strain is as much emotional as economic. We’re so tired. Aren’t you tired? Exhausted by loneliness and vigilance and fear, our eyeballs strained from hours with our screens, bodies and brains burned out from Cloroxing all our groceries and then launching a fevered search for a CVS in a 30-mile radius that isn’t sold out of Clorox wipes because we are always running low. Parents are trying to run Zoom schools for their eight-year-olds. People living alone have not so much as high-fived another soul since before St. Patrick’s Day. It feels like more than enough work to swing from one hour to the next like they’re monkey bars, to not let yourself really sit with the fact that we are living through the plot of a movie so scary we’d want to watch it with our hands over our eyes.
Still, there are options here that cost zero dollars and require little effort. We could lower all the flags to half-mast, as some states have already done. We could have a national minute of silence at the same time each day or week, a quiet counterpoint to the 7 p.m. cheers and sirens for health care workers.
But we are much more readily galvanized to cheer each other up; to fundraise for first responders and out-of-work bartenders; to FaceTime into virtual commencements and socially distant proms; to support local businesses so that, when all this is over and we stumble into the sunlight again, our streets aren’t just one long strip of Chase banks and Amazon drops. We are far better equipped to take all that action than to be still with our sorrow, much more comfortable saying that it will all be OK in the end than admitting that things are very bad and will remain so for far longer than we think we can bear. That you might not know someone who has died, yet. But by the time this is over, you might.


newrepublic--2020-05-20--The Wolf House Is a Stop-Motion Nightmare

Since the pandemic began , the flow of movie industry publicity—flashy premieres , packed-out festivals , drip-fed interview “ exclusives ” —has ground to a halt .
There are no summer blockbusters , no lines around the block .
All these still waters , however , can let smaller pictures float to the top .
The Wolf House is a Spanish- and German-language animated film by the Chilean artists Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña .
Though they have collaborated since 2007 , this is their debut feature film .
Rummage around their website , and you ’ ll find a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , painted , plastered ) deeply concerned with childhood , folktale , and myth .
The film is set in “ La Colonia , ” a self-described utopian community of German people living an Amish-esque existence in Chile .
“ La Colonia ” is an unmistakable analogue for the actual Colonia Dignidad , a large , isolated commune founded in 1961 in Chile by Paul Schäfer .
He was a former Nazi medic who fled Germany after accusations that he had abused children , and he made the religious colony into his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the “ permanent uncle.
” When General Pinochet came to power in 1973 , he looked favorably on the compound , which he used as a venue for torturing and murdering dissidents .
The Wolf House begins with a grandfatherly voice-over telling us that , once upon a time , a little German girl named Maria let two pigs out of the colony , then ran out into the woods to chase after them .
Maria speaks in German-accented Spanish .
She is blonde , with blue eyes .
As Maria wanders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sees dreamlike images drift across the walls and floor and ceiling , we have the sense of entering into a dark , dark subconscious .
There , she finds her escaped pigs , which she determines to mother until they turn into human children .

Maria and the pigs are sometimes painted, sometimes three-dimensional, but constantly morphing, and the environment around them morphs, too. Images mutate according to the logic of dreams and emotion. This is not Wallace and Gromit: Every aspect of The Wolf House is ragged and unfinished, with the rough and plastery feel of a Paula Rego sculpture. (Indeed, Maria’s pig creatures at times mimic the Paula Rego sculpture Prince Pig.)
The already-dark plot darkens further as Maria’s pig-children start to rebel against her benevolent regime. It seems that she has done things that she did not mean to do; been cruel when she meant to be kind. This is a political film, although it is pitched at the register of surreal nightmare, and Maria’s doubts are expressed in the booming, male voice, represented on-screen by a kind of all-seeing eye, coaxing her back to the arms of the colony. There are oceans of subtext to plumb in the relationship between Maria and her pigs, who pass through various forms, including little white children, before developing something like their own free will.
A still from The Wolf House (Courtesy of Kimstim)
Is Maria a renegade, inspiring her pig-children to rebel? Or is this all a fairy tale for fascists, a warning to the indoctrinated members of La Colonia that they can never strike out alone? From the grandfatherly voice-over at the outset, The Wolf House is framed as a piece of propaganda, making Maria’s adventure outside the colony’s walls dangerous and irresponsible. It complicates our ability to take Maria’s fate at face value.


newrepublic--2020-05-21--The Rise of the 3D-Printed Gun

The Rise of the 3D-Printed Gun

In 2013 , a then-25-year-old gun rights activist named Cody Wilson opened a potential Pandora ’ s box when his open-source gun design collective , Defense Distributed , released plans for the Liberator .
The gun , named after a famed World War II-era pistol , could be manufactured almost entirely at home , with a 3D printer .
The U.S. Department of State soon intervened , sending a letter demanding that the plans be taken down , and the Liberator files were pulled offline .
But there was no putting the lightning back in that particular bottle .
More @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during the two days they were live on Defense Distributed ’ s website .
Since then , a cadre of designers has been creating , refining , and distributing their own 3-D printing plans for firearms .
Chief among them is Deterrence Dispensed .
One of the group ’ s designers , known only as “ Ivan the Troll , ” is part of a team responsible for two of the best-known and most advanced examples of 3D-printed firearms available today : the FGC-9 ( “ Fuck Gun Control-9 ” ) , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gun parts , and the Plastikov , the world ’ s first 3D-printable AKM receiver .
( The receiver is the central frame where the gun ’ s mechanisms are housed ; essentially , the part that makes a gun a gun . )
The receiver can be used to build out a full AKM , a variant of the AK-47 automatic rifle .
Ivan is a co-author of a comprehensive new report , Desktop Firearms : Emergent Small Arms Craft Production Technologies , which runs through the history of these “ wiki @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this secretive world of gun-toting designers .
The “ troll ” part of his nom de guerre is apt : He recently released a design for a 3D-printable Glock 17 magazine , the Menendez , christened after the U.S. senator from New Jersey who got Ivan banned from Twitter for posting gun design files .

A number of major corporations (including Ford, Toyota, and Nascar), universities, local businesses, and even high schools have begun manufacturing thousands of 3D-printed medical face shields, in an attempt to fill the void. The technology’s relatively quick manufacturing turnaround has made it an unexpectedly useful tool in the fight against the coronavirus. The versatility of the medium has been a boon, as well: In Italy, a company invented a way to modify a snorkeling mask into a ventilator mask using a 3D-printed attachment. 3D printing won’t be replacing traditional manufacturing anytime soon, but it’s made a significant dent in today’s acute PPE shortages.
Since April 3, workers at Makelab, a 3D printing company based in Brooklyn, have been churning out over 175 3D-printed face shields a day to donate to area hospitals. They’ve also donated 200 shields to grocery store workers at their local Trader Joe’s, in a nod to the risks these essential workers continue to face on the job. Makelab’s face shield design costs $9.25 and takes approximately one hour to manufacture. According to Makelab co-founder Christina Perla, 3D printing offers such an agile and lean supply chain that it was “a no-brainer” for her shop to start manufacturing PPE. “I’m hoping that the FDA will consider creating an approved process for approving 3D printing for more PPE use after Covid-19,” she told me by email.
Meanwhile, four students at a preparatory school in Coconut Creek, Florida, have banded together to print more than 8,500 mask extenders for frontline workers in their area. Jason Krause Jr. started the project—dubbed Earstraps—with a design he made using Fusion360 CAD software. His school, North Broward Preparatory, gave his team permission to use the school’s printers at first, but by now, thanks to a flood of donations, Team Earstraps is well on its way to becoming a full-blown PPE factory. “I think when this pandemic is over,” Krause said by email, “the world will look towards the 3D printing community as how it helped so much and how useful 3D printing is.”


newrepublic--2020-05-21--America’s Deadly Obsession With Intellectual Property

In the face of several global crises , world leaders have yet to agree on how to handle intellectual property during emergencies .
This week , American officials rejected language in a World Health Organization resolution that would allow poor countries to copy Covid-19 vaccines or drugs once these treatments are developed .
The American officials claimed such a policy would send “ the wrong message to innovators who will be essential to the solutions the whole world needs.
” But without such a policy , it ’ s unlikely many poorer countries would be able to afford life-saving treatment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attachment to intellectual property rights is one of the more sobering similarities between the coronavirus and the climate crisis .
Both situations will probably require urgent innovations , and require that such innovations be made widely available , regardless of profit margin .
Just as there are sick patients who it isn ’ t profitable to treat , there are greenhouse gas emissions it won ’ t be profitable to mitigate .
And if we fail to heal those patients or curb those emissions , millions could die .
While much of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of fossil fuels is already on hand , a sustainable energy system will involve bringing a whole range of new technologies into widespread use : longer-lasting battery storage , grid-management software , and processes for decarbonizing sectors like steel and aviation , to name just a few examples .
This involves generating an enormous amount of what ’ s known as intellectual property .
Through patents and copyrights , that means certain companies will own the rights to innovations which , in the long run , are no less lifesaving than many medicines @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made a well-publicized point of releasing all of Tesla ’ s carmaking patents , waxing poetic about his fealty to an open-source movement .
“ When I started out with my first company , Zip2 , I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them , ” Musk wrote on the Tesla website .
“ And maybe they were good long ago , but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress , entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the years since , he ’ s continued taking out patents for battery technology .
This year , he patented a grid management system “ with capability to control everything from massive grid-scale energy storage installations down to your washing machine.
” The various arms of Musk ’ s empire , of course , have enjoyed sizable support from the U.S. government , from SpaceX to SolarCity to Tesla itself .
But you won ’ t find him handing Uncle Sam much credit .

In that case, the benefit to the public was clear: winning the war. Today, the climate emergency presents another clear need. The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, gives the government the right to break up patent monopolies in the event of an emergency and distribute licensing rights to other firms “to alleviate health and safety needs.” As Zachary Eldredge, a doctoral candidate in physics, noted recently in The Trouble, the government can also ask forgiveness rather than permission to break patents. “Rather than invoke any direct claim on the patent (as the government has for Bayh-Dole march-in rights), the government can use the technology immediately and pay damages later. Although this may imply that the government needs to directly be involved in the production, the law is clear that contractors or others acting with government authorization are protected,” he wrote. “The net result of either legal strategy is the same: The government is directly able to seize the relevant intellectual property and authorize its use by other parties.” Uncharacteristically, the World Trade Organization—earth’s most reliable enforcer of property rights—generally allows for governments to partake in compulsory licensing, wherein countries can intervene to break up patent monopolies.
If the rapid deployment of clean energy is to rely on anything other than market forces and private-sector largesse, such dramatic action may be needed. Today, research and development is concentrated in wealthy countries. Much of that spending is done in North America and Western Europe, both at top research institutions and in big companies. As a result, innovation occurs around the needs and preferences of those countries. This puts the onus on developing countries—those worst hit by climate change, which have historically contributed the least to the problem—to purchase those technologies, whose prices reflect the rents paid to the holders of patents and copyrights. Climate advocates in the so-called global south have long pointed to the need for technology transfers as part of any comprehensive climate agreement, allowing poorer countries to access clean development without paying exorbitant prices to corporations in the global north.
Asked if he owned the patent to his world-changing polio vaccines, Dr. Jonas Salk famously answered, “Would you patent the sun?” Today, some companies might try. But whether we’re talking about vaccines or groundbreaking clean energy, lifesaving technologies shouldn’t be treated as precious commodities to be hoarded for private gain. In the midst of global emergencies, they’re public goods to be deployed as rapidly as possible.


newrepublic--2020-05-21--Blow Up the Restaurant Industry and Start Over

March 14 would be the last Saturday shift that Sarah worked , though she didn ’ t know it at the time .
“ We were so busy , and everyone that came in was like , ‘ I can ’ t believe how busy y ’ all are !
It ’ s good that you ’ re busy , ’ ” Sarah , who asked that I not use her real name , said of the upscale Brooklyn restaurant where she worked as a server until it was shut down due to the pandemic .
“ And I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ na be here .
I wan na go home.
” Guidelines from the city , both around personal protective gear and sanitation , had been unclear and contradictory .
The staff was terrified .
“ We were watching people cough into their napkins , and I had hives on my hands from washing them so much , ” she said .
“ I was scared out of my mind.
” By that Monday , bars and restaurants across the state were shuttered , and Sarah—along with the rest of the waitstaff—was laid off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be hired again .
She hasn ’ t heard anything from her former bosses since .
Even before the Covid-19 crisis hit , the restaurant industry was a risky business that relied on razor-thin margins and offered few protections for its workforce .
Cooks endure long shifts of grueling physical labor ; servers generally live off tips , an inherently discriminatory practice that began in America when restaurant owners didn ’ t want to pay formerly enslaved people for their work .
Restaurant workers are highly segregated by race and gender , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other unfair labor practices .
Health insurance and paid time off are rare for anyone not working for a large restaurant group .
Anyone who takes issue with this can be quickly replaced .
And this kind of inequity generally exists across the industry , with wage theft settlements dotting a map that stretches from franchises like McDonald ’ s to high-end restaurants like Per Se .
In the Bay Area , often considered the heart of the sustainable food movement , workers at the beloved Tartine Bakery voted to unionize in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s owners have tried to thwart .
Owners Liz Prueitt and Chad Robertson have taken the common party line of not being anti-union but claiming that a union isn ’ t right for their particular business .
The current crisis has turned the industry ’ s cracks into chasms , exposing the ways in which it fails its workers almost by design .
It has also raised the question of what restaurants will look like—and how they could survive—once this is all over .
But a better question might be whether they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What could restaurants look like if we threw out the old system and built something better ?

At Reem’s, a bakery in Oakland, California, chef-owner Reem Assil has been trying to answer this question of how to build a stronger, more equitable restaurant, too. Her first food service job was at Arizmendi Bakery, a worker-owned cooperative that began in San Francisco and now has six locations in the Bay Area, and she sees that model as one way to make the industry more sustainable. It’s also set up to be more fair. (Worker ownership is exactly what it sounds like: Workers own the business, democratically manage major operations, and share profits.) “In a cooperative, people are emotionally in a better place, because they’re grappling with things together. You have to be embedded in the work to understand it, to understand what works and what doesn’t.” And it distributes the business risk more evenly, Assil added: “Why should the onus fall on one person to be the savior or the person who fails everybody?”
“We need ownership models that challenge the status quo, all along the production line.”
Tunde Wey, a chef based in New Orleans whose work has centered around income inequality, racism, and gentrification, sees co-ops as part of the solution, too. “I don’t necessarily think all businesses should be worker-owned co-ops, but I think we need more healthy competition between different models of businesses,” he said. “Right now it’s heavily skewed to the top-down ownership model. But we need ownership models that challenge the status quo, all along the production line. I think one way would just be compensating workers in such a way that restaurants become a luxury.”
The co-op model isn’t a cure-all, though. Worker-owners are still facing real hardship during the Covid-19 crisis, but they are figuring out what might come next democratically rather than depending on the whims of a single boss. “It’s both easier and harder,” Cathy Goldsmith, a worker-owner of the Cheese Board Collective, a Bay Area cheese shop, bakery, and pizzeria, told Eater in March when asked about reaching consensus on the co-op’s pandemic response. “When we decided to close, we decided to take that financial hit,” Goldsmith said. “And we all take that hit.”


newrepublic--2020-05-21--Why the Pandemic Is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad

Last week , First Things editor R.R .
Reno , a prominent Catholic intellectual who backed Donald Trump for president , let the world know he ’ d had enough of the effete conformists following public-health guidelines in response to the coronavirus pandemic .
Sharing a photo on Twitter of Trump saluting World War II veterans , none of them wearing masks , he declared , “ They ’ re men , not cowards .
Masks=enforced cowardice.
” The reaction from critics was swift and punishing , as they noted the emerging wisdom that masks may be one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Covid-19 .
But Reno decided to tweet through it in a typo-laden tirade .
“ The mask culture if fear driven .
Masks+cowardice , ” he wrote .
“ It ’ s a regime dominate by fear of infection and fear of causing of infection .
Both are species of cowardice.
” Other , similarly garbled tweets followed , but one of them serves as an especially telling summary of his position : “ Now we know who want to cower in place .
By all means rage against those who want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aberration .
Since March , he ’ s produced a string of commentary doubting the severity of the pandemic and lamenting the measures taken to combat it—particularly the temporary closures of churches .
It ’ s not as deadly as we feared , he ’ s said , and for those under 35 , perhaps little more worrisome than the flu—a statement that blithely ignores all that we still don ’ t know about Covid-19 , from the long-term effects it might cause in even healthy young adults to the sudden spike in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter .
Reno renders his verdict : “ The science increasingly shows that the measures we have taken in the last few weeks have been both harmful—with freedoms lost , money spent , livelihoods destroyed—and pointless , ” he wrote .
It ’ s not just that Reno can sound at times like a coronavirus truther .
He is also convinced that our pandemic response stems from a deeper civilizational malaise , one that prioritizes the fleeting material world over the everlasting life that awaits our souls after death .
In a missive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ There are many things more precious than life , ” and castigated political leaders , especially New York Governor Andrew Cuomo , for leading “ an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death .
”

The latter prompted a lot of jokes about the literal death cults forming on the right, but there is something more at work here. Writing in Providence magazine, Jason E. Vickers described this death-embracing cohort as possessing a “bitter remnant mindset,” and acting “as though they are the last Christians in America.” It’s a worldview shot through with grievances against the corrupt, decadent societies of the West, and it’s shared by otherwise very different factions on the right. Followers of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option might seek to build intentional communities and withdraw from modern society, while Christian nationalists long for the political power to defeat it—but they have the same enemies.
For all Reno’s paeans to courage, the pandemic has shown us, in starker terms than before, the extent to which modern conservatism is driven by resentment of a seemingly hostile, terrifying world. Not all conservatives have succumbed to this impulse during the pandemic, of course. But those who have reveal the ways in which the pandemic is being shoehorned into a familiar culture war.
Let’s return to the example of Reno, since he manages to encompass both the raging id of the anti-lockdown protesters and the philosophical justifications of their actions that have appeared in the conservative press. One of his “Coronavirus Diary” entries begins with him visiting an emergency room in an outer-borough hospital. He can’t say more, though, because “the present conditions of public health hysteria” mean his host “might lose his job if higher-ups found out I penetrated the ‘no visitors’ cordon sanitaire.” Reno notes that, after cases of COVID-19 flooded the hospital in late March and early April, the doctor says they had since plummeted—a development Reno passes over as a happy mystery, never connecting it to the stay-at-home orders and economic shutdown that he has called “pointless” and “cowering.”


newrepublic--2020-05-21--The Provocations of Kent Monkman

The Provocations of Kent Monkman

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on all fours , his shoulders grasped by a snarling woman in dark gray chinos , his ass cheeks being spread apart by a woman in a light blue tank top , her head thrown back in mid-laugh .
Standing over them is Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle , donning a pair of thigh-high leather boots and a body-length feather headdress .
In her grasp , raised high , is a butt plug , painted blood red and shaped in the form of a hand—the unofficial symbol used in the many awareness campaigns for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or MMIW , crisis , wherein Indigenous women and girls in North America , including the LGBTQ2S community , have been abducted and killed at astronomical rates due to centuries of neglect by the Canadian and American governments .
There ’ s more to Hanky Panky , the latest controversial painting from Kent Monkman , a renowned artist and two-spirit Fisher River Cree Nation citizen who recently placed two paintings , mistikôsiwak ( Wooden Boat People ) and Resurgence of the People , in the Metropolitan Museum of Art ’ s Great Hall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ceremony room , full of Cree women in various forms of traditional and modern dress , all of them laughing , presumably at Trudeau ’ s fate ; there ’ s the huddle of aghast , gray-faced men , several of them physically comforting a concerned John MacDonald , Canada ’ s first prime minister , who ignored treaties and intentionally starved the Indigenous population to make way for the national railroad ; there ’ s a Mountie , lying facedown , ass out , pants around his knees .
But the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Trudeau .
It ’ s the look on his face and the faces of the women holding the prime minister ’ s hindquarters in place .
It ’ s the red hand gleaming in the sunlight , combining religious symbolism with the sexual act of fisting .
The rest of those present in Hanky Panky—particularly the women that Monkman attempts to center and empower—are merely witnesses , external to the real show .
This literal marginalization of the scene ’ s Indigenous women , as well as the painting ’ s notion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sexual violence , broadly defines the criticism that has been voiced since Hanky Panky ’ s online release last week .
Anticipating the backlash , Monkman included a content warning when he unveiled the work on Instagram .
Monkman also posted an explanation of the new piece to his Facebook page on Saturday .
Despite what the painting suggests , the Trudeau character is not about to be assaulted , Monkman claims , because he has a faint smile on his face and a red handkerchief in the back pocket of his pants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in which a red hanky denotes a preference for fisting .
Monkman offered no explanation for the facedown , ass-up Mountie , whose pockets are empty , though he did post an apology two days after the release of the painting that addressed the critical response to these shortcomings .

This dynamic explains why the very existence of Monkman’s paintings in the Met, more than the actual art itself, fueled a host of laudatory articles from Canadian and America media outlets. “A Cree Artist Redraws History,” blared The New York Times. The coverage all patted the Met on the back for forcing the North American art scene to momentarily glance at the dark depravity that is the history of colonialism. Regan de Loggans, an art historian and citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, got at the root problem of the universal praise for Monkman’s art in a recent essay for Canadian Art:
Monkman’s paintings do little to question art-historical inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples, and pander to the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty through the narrative of a shared history between settlers and colonizers as though their experiences are commensurate. The shared-history narrative proposes multiculturalism and increased representation as reparations, and conflates colonialism as a wrongdoing of the past when it is in fact a system of the present.
The simple and hard truth for Indigenous artists in North America is that the path to financial independence and widespread acclaim is through institutions built by colonizers—institutions like the Met and the Smithsonian, which still regularly display culturally and religiously important Indigenous items and call them art. Their walls were built on stolen land and their rooms stuffed with stolen artifacts. And yet penetrating those same walls is billed as the most assured pathway to success, so creative sacrifices are often made. The confines of this economic and cultural reality squeeze mainstream Indigenous creators into the same problematic group that includes Disney’s Pocahontas or any of the hundreds of Western white savior narratives—a group that profits white people at the expense of a marginalized people.
In the case of Indigenous artists like Monkman, the power dynamic shifts to a form of lateral violence—i.e., violence between those in Indigenous communities. Hanky Panky’s failure to clearly define the intentions of its characters, particularly the Indigenous women, is a kind of appropriation, too. It falls in with a tradition of artists voicing the perspective of Indigenous groups that do not wholly belong to them. This is not an intrinsically flawed creative pursuit, but speaking from another perspective always invites such critiques, due to entrenched conservative attitudes formed by past cultural mining and misrepresentation. Authors Rebecca Roanhoarse and Linda Hogan both were attacked on these grounds for their books Trail of Lightning and Mean Spirit, respectively. So was Leslie Silko for her book Ceremony. In the fine art world, the closest applicable case is Fritz Scholder, the renowned Luiseño artist of the twentieth century who was a self-described “non-Indian Indian.” The pervading question being: Who gets to create art about whom?


newrepublic--2020-05-21--The Unmattering of Black Lives

The Unmattering of Black Lives

We still have the grainy black-and-white photos of Mary Turner—a pregnant Black woman who was lynched in May 1918 , whose husband had been lynched just days before—as reminders of the very specific history of terrorism in our country .
It ’ s a terrorism that snuffed out the lives of men , women , and children as an expression of state-sanctioned racial murder .
We tend to elide the still-living legacy of racist predation with the comforting reflection that we no longer live in an era in which the cost of voting could be death , when the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wall Street triggered a vengeful white backlash that left it in smoldering ruins , when race riots and lynchings could erupt with a devastating suddenness that left an entire group targeted and terrorized , and when the national government utterly relinquished the fate of its Black citizens to the tyranny of white dominion .
But this complacent line drawn between then and now is a fiction .
The shock of modern-day racial terror is the forced return to a supposedly bygone era and the resurgence of a cultural milieu that was largely defined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ random victimization of Black Americans by this suffocating past echoes the forced relocation of ancestors uprooted from their homes and lives to serve as beasts of burden tasked with building the wealth of America .
And this selfsame senseless unmattering of Black life makes these deaths , among all others , exceptionally intolerable .
Of a larger piece with this unmattering of Black lives lost through state violence is the sacrifice of Black Americans via the stealth victimization of our bodies through radical disparities of health and wealth .
We are witnessing yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities in the face of the raging Covid-19 pandemic .
But the longer-term backdrop to this death toll resides in the way that the social harming of Black bodies is naturalized as an ordinary pathogen that takes 15 , 20 , or even 25 years off Black lives as compared to white ones .
The disproportionate lethality of Covid-19 among Black Americans is directly related to the environmental racism and health care disparities that existed long before it .
The brutal predictability of this process prompts little fanfare .
Instead , the slow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reigning health and wealth disparities is taken as a kind of second nature—a reckoning of mass death delivered by the invisible hand of fate , choice , and natural circumstance .
We rightly characterize the killings of Arbery and Taylor as homicides , authorized and facilitated by permissive state policies rooted in what we had hoped was a bygone era .
But what shall we make of the intersection between these different modalities of Black people ’ s death—between the intentional killings and the left-dyings ?
How are we to understand the hurried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reopen the economy ” —which in truth is a racialized mandate to push more Black health and service workers directly in the path of the pandemic so as to satisfy the convenience of a predominately white and affluent customer base—when the resulting elevated death tolls for Black workers are fully known and partly preventable by life-sustaining expenditures permitting these workers to continue safely sheltering in place ?

We tend to elide the still-living legacy of racist predation with the comforting reflection that we no longer live in an era in which the cost of voting could be death, when the first stirrings of Black economic self-sufficiency on Black Wall Street triggered a vengeful white backlash that left it in smoldering ruins, when race riots and lynchings could erupt with a devastating suddenness that left an entire group targeted and terrorized, and when the national government utterly relinquished the fate of its Black citizens to the tyranny of white dominion. But this complacent line drawn between then and now is a fiction. The shock of modern-day racial terror is the forced return to a supposedly bygone era and the resurgence of a cultural milieu that was largely defined by feasting on Black life. The random victimization of Black Americans by this suffocating past echoes the forced relocation of ancestors uprooted from their homes and lives to serve as beasts of burden tasked with building the wealth of America. And this selfsame senseless unmattering of Black life makes these deaths, among all others, exceptionally intolerable.
Of a larger piece with this unmattering of Black lives lost through state violence is the sacrifice of Black Americans via the stealth victimization of our bodies through radical disparities of health and wealth. We are witnessing yet again the disproportionate deaths suffered in Black communities in the face of the raging Covid-19 pandemic. But the longer-term backdrop to this death toll resides in the way that the social harming of Black bodies is naturalized as an ordinary pathogen that takes 15, 20, or even 25 years off Black lives as compared to white ones. The disproportionate lethality of Covid-19 among Black Americans is directly related to the environmental racism and health care disparities that existed long before it. The brutal predictability of this process prompts little fanfare. Instead, the slow, steady removal of Black bodies under reigning health and wealth disparities is taken as a kind of second nature—a reckoning of mass death delivered by the invisible hand of fate, choice, and natural circumstance.
We rightly characterize the killings of Arbery and Taylor as homicides, authorized and facilitated by permissive state policies rooted in what we had hoped was a bygone era. But what shall we make of the intersection between these different modalities of Black people’s death—between the intentional killings and the left-dyings? How are we to understand the hurried decisions taken by state governments to “reopen the economy”—which in truth is a racialized mandate to push more Black health and service workers directly in the path of the pandemic so as to satisfy the convenience of a predominately white and affluent customer base—when the resulting elevated death tolls for Black workers are fully known and partly preventable by life-sustaining expenditures permitting these workers to continue safely sheltering in place?


newrepublic--2020-05-22--I Lost My Job Cleaning Houses and Don’t Know Where I Go From Here

I paid my March rent with my credit card .
That ’ s the reason it ’ s so depleted .
I didn ’ t pay April or May , I ’ m trying to work out something with my landlord to ask her to please wait because it ’ s really hard right now .
She calls me all the time to see if I ’ ve finally gotten a job , if I can get an advance .
I have very little money , and I don ’ t want to spend it on that , but she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Oh , apply for help from the government , ” but when you do the application it says only residents and that I ’ m not a citizen .
And the truth is , it hurts my heart constantly because I work and I contribute .
I pay taxes , I help within my community , I ’ m an activist , and I study—and there millions and millions of other domestic workers just like me who are being let down by the system .
To be not even noticed and not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ essential workers , I consider that a horrible discrimination .
Domestic workers are on the same level as many of the people that are helping in terms of doctors and nurses , because we are also on the front line keeping families safe .
It ’ s really a discrimination that we ’ re not considered for this help .
We need to be valued and recognized as workers in the community .
I also want to say that , as a domestic violence and sexual violence survivor and a victim of wage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me and are suffering .
It ’ s painful , we hear everybody repeating that this virus is impacting everybody .
But it ’ s impacting a lot of us on the front lines in a different way .
There ’ s a population of domestic workers who are not visible , who are not included in this process , and who are the lowest in the totem pole as workers , so the considerations are not there .
Honestly , I don ’ t know where I go from here .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I feel like I ’ m falling into a very deep well .
In 2008 , during that recession , I felt a pressure , but I was still able to work .
Right now it feels different .
It feels like there ’ s no exit , especially for undocumented domestic workers because we have no benefits .
We have no papers , no work , and nowhere to go to get help because we ’ re excluded .

Everyone tells you “Oh, apply for help from the government,” but when you do the application it says only residents and that I’m not a citizen. And the truth is, it hurts my heart constantly because I work and I contribute. I pay taxes, I help within my community, I’m an activist, and I study—and there millions and millions of other domestic workers just like me who are being let down by the system. To be not even noticed and not considered as part of this group of essential workers, I consider that a horrible discrimination. Domestic workers are on the same level as many of the people that are helping in terms of doctors and nurses, because we are also on the front line keeping families safe. It’s really a discrimination that we’re not considered for this help. We need to be valued and recognized as workers in the community.
I also want to say that, as a domestic violence and sexual violence survivor and a victim of wage theft, many of us are like me and are suffering. It’s painful, we hear everybody repeating that this virus is impacting everybody. But it’s impacting a lot of us on the front lines in a different way. There’s a population of domestic workers who are not visible, who are not included in this process, and who are the lowest in the totem pole as workers, so the considerations are not there.
Honestly, I don’t know where I go from here. There’s a lot of uncertainty. I feel like I’m falling into a very deep well. In 2008, during that recession, I felt a pressure, but I was still able to work. Right now it feels different. It feels like there’s no exit, especially for undocumented domestic workers because we have no benefits. We have no papers, no work, and nowhere to go to get help because we’re excluded.


newrepublic--2020-05-22--What If Mass Unemployment Is Here to Stay?

“ We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world , ” the author Michel Houellebecq recently and gloomily predicted .
“ It will be the same , just a bit worse.
” But if the staggering death rate in the United States and the ongoing stumbles of the federal and state governments when it comes to helping people weather the economic collapse are any indication , “ just a bit worse ” might not even encompass the extent of the damage to come .
The patchwork of relief measures supplied by the stimulus bills that have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in theory , better than nothing , though they have amounted to essentially that for millions of people .
A shortlist of their failures might look like : an insufficient relief program for small businesses that was partially devoured by large corporations and ran dry almost immediately ; an overloaded and ill-functioning unemployment claims system that has left millions of newly laid-off workers unable to collect benefits ; and the complete inability of the government to guarantee any kind of meaningful health care access to everyone in the midst of a massive public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no clear end in sight : The 38 million jobs lost over the span of just a few months aren ’ t likely to just magically appear when state lockdown orders expire , despite what the president has insisted .
According to one recent poll , nearly 80 percent of laid-off workers said they expected to be rehired once the pandemic was over .
But that , as Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen recently wrote , may be too optimistic .
“ The layoffs , which began in low-wage sectors and public-facing industries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she noted .
“ Many of those so-called furloughs will turn into something much more permanent.
” According to one estimate from economists at the University of Chicago , up to 42 percent of the jobs lost during the pandemic might in fact vanish forever , as stores and restaurants go out of business permanently or are only able to reopen at a diminished capacity .
And for industries that were struggling to stay afloat even prior to the pandemic—journalism , for one—the financial impact of the coronavirus crash could be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job eventually returns , it probably won ’ t happen for years , judging by the country ’ s previous recession recoveries .
As a Yahoo Finance analysis of Labor Department data found , “ Beginning in 1991 , each of the last three recessions has been followed by a ‘ jobless ’ recovery in which the economy starts growing again , but employers remain stubbornly resistant to hiring.
” In the wake of the Great Recession , it wasn ’ t until nearly a decade later that employment finally returned to pre-recession @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job recovery , as it happens , did nothing to reverse decades of already stagnant wages . )
That ’ s sure to have serious consequences for laid-off workers themselves .
The effects of long-term unemployment—defined as being out of work for six months or longer—on people ’ s well-being and future labor market prospects are both grave and well-documented : One report from the Urban Institute , for instance , found that people unemployed over the long term not only suffered from poor health and earned less when they eventually found new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s academic performance also deteriorated .
People unemployed for more than six months have also reported higher rates of mental health issues , such as depression , anxiety , substance abuse , and even suicide .
Or as the historian Michael Denning once grimly put it , “ Under capitalism , the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited .
”

Even if every single lost job eventually returns, it probably won’t happen for years, judging by the country’s previous recession recoveries. As a Yahoo Finance analysis of Labor Department data found, “Beginning in 1991, each of the last three recessions has been followed by a ‘jobless’ recovery in which the economy starts growing again, but employers remain stubbornly resistant to hiring.” In the wake of the Great Recession, it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that employment finally returned to prerecession levels. (And even that eventual job recovery, as it happens, did nothing to reverse decades of already stagnant wages.) That’s sure to have serious consequences for laid-off workers themselves. The effects of long-term unemployment—defined as being out of work for six months or longer—on people’s well-being and future labor market prospects are both grave and well documented: One report from the Urban Institute, for instance, found that when people were unemployed over the long term, not only did they suffer from poor health and earn less when they eventually found new jobs, but their children’s academic performance also deteriorated. People unemployed for more than six months have also reported higher rates of mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even suicide. Or as the historian Michael Denning once grimly put it, “Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.”
More troubling still is that our existing safety net—now strained to its breaking point by the pandemic—is hardly equipped to deal with a spate of wide-scale, long-term unemployment, and even those who have successfully filed unemployment claims have found themselves hanging. “For basically six weeks, I’ve received nothing,” Scott Ross, a Maryland-based restaurant manager laid off in March told Bloomberg. The initial claims process, he also noted, had taken him six hours to complete. On the one hand, some economists have argued, the country does have more anti-poverty provisions than it did on the eve of the Great Depression, including, most importantly, an actual system of unemployment benefits, even if it’s now overloaded. But at the same time, the last 40 years have also seen steady assaults on those very resources by politicians on both sides of the aisle. In particular, welfare reform in the 1990s, which instituted work requirements for a series of benefit programs, has made it all the more difficult for people to access aid when they aren’t employed.


newrepublic--2020-05-22--Female Scientists Are Bearing the Brunt of Quarantine Child-Rearing

I was late filing this article .
While I was writing it , my three-year-old son refused to nap .
When I interviewed people , he interrupted to tell them stories .
He climbed on my lap as I typed and twice accidentally smacked me in the face with his plastic dinosaur .
He hit a keyboard shortcut and pulled up my photo library , and then he somehow changed my font to Calibri .
Raising kids has always had its challenges .
But raising kids during a pandemic , with no schools , no daycares , and no support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trying to work , is downright impossible .
And in certain fields—including those producing vital work for addressing the coronavirus itself , as well as the oncoming climate crisis—that ’ s starting to show .
Elizabeth Hannon , deputy editor at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , recently wrote on Twitter that women have been submitting a “ negligible ” number of articles during this pandemic .
“ Never seen anything like it , ” Hannon wrote .
Another editor said submissions from women have stayed steady , while submissions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Another said that submissions by women and men were high at the beginning of the year , but she expected a slowdown in the coming months .
Recent analysis from University of Toronto ecologist Megan Frederickson confirms it ’ s not just those individual journals : Women submitted markedly fewer papers to preprint servers , where scientists post papers before peer review , in March and April , both compared to prior months and compared to those same months in 2019 .
The pandemic may be exacerbating—and revealing—stark divisions that have long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with troubling implications for the research these fields go on to produce .
All research has suffered from lab closures and travel bans .
But being at home all day , every day , has also dramatically increased domestic duties , particularly for parents , Hannon told me in an email .
( Like many of the women I spoke with for this article , email was easier to manage than a phone call . )
Childcare and homeschooling are perhaps the biggest tasks , but we ’ re also cooking and cleaning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job unto itself , and we ’ re spending much more time checking in on family and friends .

In disciplines that have been slow to admit women into their ranks, the average age of women in the field will be lower than the average age of men, Hannon told me. “Women, then, are more likely than the field’s average to have young children.” In addition, Turetsky said, there’s evidence that most female academics who are married tie the knot with another academic, while a large proportion of male academics have a partner who stays at home and tends to the family. These inequities, as always, don’t end with the gender divide; for people of color and others with marginalized identities, the pandemic is striking especially hard.
Leslie Gonzalez, associate professor at Michigan State University, and Kimberly Griffin, associate professor at the University of Maryland and editor of the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, recently co-authored a report on the importance of equity in education during the Covid-19 pandemic. Women in research, and particularly women of color, tend to shoulder the burden of emotional activities, empathy, and service more than their white male colleagues—and even more so in a global pandemic, they told me.
“There already are burdens that women and women with racially minoritized identities tend to carry that men do not,” Griffin said, like connecting with and supporting students—which has become all the more important during the pandemic. Women have also often been told to communicate “more like a man,” Griffin said, and to be constantly available like their male counterparts, who “try to work all the time, and they do whatever they can, and they’re always on. How does that look for women who are more likely to be the main caregivers for children or parents, family members, who may not have that time to yield, as compared to cis heterosexual men who probably have a partner that they can give more of the household responsibilities to?” Griffin asked. “You have all of these things happening, and then you layer on top of that a pandemic.”


newrepublic--2020-05-22--Jonathan Schell’s Warning From the Brink

Of the neologisms coined by early nuclear strategists to plan for World War III , “ overkill ” is the great crossover success .
As a metaphor , it ranges as far from its original context as a word can— “ The pony on her birthday was overkill ” —but from common usage a child can intuit its first meaning as applied in nuclear war-fighting : When you can obliterate a city with 10 megatons , it ’ s excessive to use 20 or 200 megatons .
As the firepower of Cold War arsenals began to exceed that required to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and cities , sometime in the mid-1950s , overkill went from being a technical factor used in target selection , to a description of the entire East-West face-off , which for three decades resembled a contest devised in the game room of an asylum , with teams vying to achieve the highest possible factor of apocalyptic redundancy .
In 1986 , the apogee of overkill , Washington and Moscow sat on a combined arsenal of 64,000 warheads with a yield approaching 20,000 megatons , or half a Hiroshima for every girl and boy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was during the disorienting final sprint of this arms race that Jonathan Schell produced two of the only enduring books ever written about nuclear weapons .
A new edition from the Library of America testifies to their status as classics in a genre full of out-of-print artifacts from long-forgotten and acronym-laden moments in Cold War time—the birth of the triad , the ABM Treaty , SALT II .
As a mid-career staffer at The New Yorker , Schell wrote The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition in 1981 and 1983 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was less the domain of street-corner prophets than of a Strangelovean cast of senior Reagan administration officials .
Rejecting the deterrence paradigm of Mutually Assured Destruction that undergirded decades of nuclear stability , the first Reagan administration pursued policies consistent with Vice President George H.W .
Bush ’ s claim that nuclear war was “ winnable.
” This shocking disconnect from reality was most evident in the administration ’ s fantasies of nuclear defense , from space lasers to the dig-a-hole civil defense program advocated by T.K .
Jones , Reagan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Theater Nuclear Forces , who in 1981 told the journalist Robert Scheer , “ If there are enough shovels to go around , everyone ’ s going to make it.
” Most of the protest literature written during this period can be placed , understandably , somewhere on a spectrum between panic and extreme panic .
This includes works by Schell ’ s British analogue and closest competitor , the social historian and peace activist E.P .
Thompson , whose books and essays of antinuclear protest are long out of print .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Abolition alone have lasted .
With few mentions of Pershing II deployments or Helmut Schmidt to distract modern readers , they focus on the permanent underlying condition that Schell called the “ nuclear predicament.
” This predicament is less about the weapons themselves , let alone specific missile programs and their strategic configurations , than about the meaning of our “ second fall from grace , ” the bite of the atomic apple revealing the secrets of matter and energy , followed by the Trinity test , Hiroshima and Nagasaki , and soon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and absurd fact that humans had wired the planet for its and our destruction.
” Nearly three-quarters of a century later , this wiring remains in place , spreading and fraying in ways that give Schell ’ s writing a startling and unwelcome currency across the decades .

The Fate of the Earth begins with unflinching descriptions of what nuclear war would do to New York City, the country, the planet. Schell’s book, drawing on studies produced during the late 1970s by an increasingly alarmed scientific community, became the period’s definitive popular treatment of the physics and faces of thermonuclear death: The first shot of gamma radiation; the electromagnetic pulse; the thermal pulse that lights everything afire within dozens of miles; the blast wave that blows everything still standing to its constituent atoms; and finally, the three waves of radioactive fallout that rain from the dark brown sky of a nuclear winter lasting months and possibly years.
Though this was “hateful to dwell on,” Schell believed such exercises were the first steps to thinking clearly about the nuclear predicament. But stopping there was as likely to lead to apathy and denial as to action. It was necessary to push on. Describing a postwar United States reduced to a bone-strewn “republic of insects and grass” was Schell’s disquieting setup for the book’s long middle essay, “The Second Death,” an inquisition into the meaning of extinction.
The nuclear predicament does not threaten us all with death, he proposed, but with “the death of death.” It has in its sights the future and the past, all of humanity unborn and the memory of everything that ever was. “In weighing the fate of the earth, we stand before a mystery,” writes Schell. Nuclear weapons threaten “not just our lives, but the meaning of our lives.” Although “lots of things could kill us, none of those possible causes reach as deep down into our lives while we are here.” The longer we allow ourselves to live under the nuclear shadow the more we are drained of the strength and imagination required to remove it. “The society that has accepted the threat of its utter destruction soon finds it hard to react to lesser ills,” he writes, “for a society cannot be at the same time asleep and awake, insane and sane, against life and for life.” Enervated by the static background horror of the nuclear threat, we slowly become “allies of death” and “sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.”


newrepublic--2020-05-22--The Blue Wave That Saved the Vote

The Blue Wave That Saved the Vote

When most people think about the significance of the 2018 midterms , they think about the House of Representatives .
Democrats , propelled by voter antipathy toward President Donald Trump , retook the chamber for the first time in eight years .
The breakthrough ended two years of complete Republican control of the federal government .
It also paved the way for Trump ’ s eventual impeachment in the Ukraine scandal last fall .
As the 2020 election nears , however , it seems like the most decisive result of the last cycle may not have been at the federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polls in 2018 to elect a variety of state and local officials .
In certain key states that Trump had won in 2016 , they opted to elect Democrats to critical positions—posts crucial to the preservation of voting rights .
Democrats ultimately flipped governorships in seven states , as well as the secretary of state ’ s office in Arizona , Colorado , and Michigan .
Those relatively unheralded results will have a profound effect on voting rights ahead of the 2020 election .
In some states , the Democratic gains will provide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ electoral system in the months leading up to the November vote .
In others , they will provide an opportunity for Democrats to push back on restrictive measures and ensure that more Americans might have a voice in choosing their next president .
Either way , it could be a grim sign for Trump ’ s already flagging reelection chances .
Trump is increasingly showing signs of fear about greater voter participation in November .
In a series of Twitter posts this week , he railed against officials in Nevada and Michigan for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every registered voter in their states .
“ Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election , ” he wrote on Wednesday .
“ This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State .
I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path !
”

It’s unclear how or if Trump could freeze any federal funds for Michigan over the move; the president often makes threats he cannot actually carry out. While “voter fraud” is a frequently deployed canard in right-wing rhetoric, the actual practice is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in the United States, with only a handful of recorded instances in recent decades amid hundreds of millions of ballots cast. Trump’s handpicked commission on the subject disbanded in 2018 without finding evidence that it is a widespread practice. Voter fraud is more often used as an excuse to enact restrictive measures like voter-ID laws, which can have the practical effect of disenfranchising thousands of otherwise-eligible voters.
Wisconsin is a classic example of how the specter of “voter fraud” can affect elections more than the phenomenon itself. The state’s voter-ID law, which first went into effect in 2016, likely kept thousands of younger and impoverished voters from casting a ballot. For state Republican officials, this was a feature and not a bug. “We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election,” Wisconsin’s then–Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican, said in a 2018 radio interview. “How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Senator [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?”
Buoyed by the nationwide wave election, Democrats Tony Evers and Josh Kaul defeated their Republican incumbents. There are few steps they can take on their own to advance voting rights: Wisconsin Republicans maintain a tight grip on the state legislature, thanks to severe gerrymandering, and the state board of elections is responsible for running and supervising elections instead of the elected secretary of state. The state Supreme Court, which has devolved into a partisan mess over the past decade under its conservative majority, is poised to remove thousands of voters from the rolls at right-wing activists’ behest later this year. But the situation would likely be worse if Democrats could not veto new legislation or defend existing laws against legal challenges. This month’s primaries are a haunting example of how much worse things could be.