newrepublic--2020-11-24--How to Pitch Sold Short

How to Pitch Sold Short

Sold Short is a vertical about inequality .
The stories we publish focus on labor , gender , racial justice , feminism , the family and kinship beyond it , Indian Country and tribal sovereignty , sexuality , wealth inequality , white supremacy , immigration and borders , state violence and the criminal legal system , mass movements ( past , present , and future ) , public goods and privatization schemes , billionaire antics , general hoarding among the top one percent and their fellow travelers , and the rest of life under capitalism .
The stories exist on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ each other : We ’ re describing things as they are , interrogating the people and systems that got us here , envisioning more just futures , and grappling with the limits of our current imagination .
You can email me at kmcdonough @ tnr.com .
What kinds of stories are you looking for ?
The vertical is a place to document the current abyss while also thinking deeply about the collective work of getting out of it .
Our approach includes timely news analysis about developing stories , long-form narrative reporting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ as told to ” pieces about daily life in bad systems , and photo essays .
In general , the pieces we run are focused on people .
Our stories explore policies , systems , and ideas , but always through the frame of how we live .

What is Sold Short?
Sold Short is about inequality. Sometimes that will be about class, wealth, and corporate misdoings. Did you know that in the United States, since the beginning of the 1980s, the top one percent’s wealth grew by 275 percent, while the bottom 20 percent saw just an 18 percent increase? No wonder most people are so mad about politics these days.
But inequality isn’t just about money. It’s about how we go about our daily lives and our intersecting identities. Sold Short stories focus on the social safety net, corporate shenanigans, the labor movement (as a broader political entity as well as in relation to workers), gender, racial justice, feminism, Indian Country and tribal sovereignty, sexuality, wealth inequality, white supremacy, immigration and borders, state violence and the criminal legal system, public goods and privatization schemes, billionaire antics, and general hoarding among the top one percent and their fellow travelers.
How do I pitch?
You can email me at pcaldwell@tnr.com. I generally prefer to receive a short pitch describing your idea, rather than an already completed draft.
What kinds of stories are you looking for?
Ones backed by both strong reporting and a unique angle. At times we’re looking for Sold Short pieces that are in conversation with our current news cycle, stories that challenge our readers to reinterpret the headlines they’ve read in The New York Times or the quick, surface-level discussions they’ve watched on cable news. But more often we’re looking for articles that are proactive, ones that are investigative or break news—ideally paired with a clear, compelling narrative. Our stories explore policies, systems, and ideas, but always through the frame of how people live. So that could be an exposé on corporate wrongdoing, an exploration of a local policy experiment (either good or bad!), or a profile of activists and organizers trying to change the system.
Pitches don’t have to be too long—a couple of paragraphs are normally enough—but they should be clear about what you want to do. A few sentences that could conceivably act as your thesis statement or “nut graf” are strongly encouraged. (Think of it as answering the question: So what is this story actually about?) If there are other pieces on the subject that have run before it (this includes pieces at The New Republic), you should include a couple of sentences distinguishing your pitch from what’s been published already or demonstrating how, through further reporting, you can develop the story in an original way. If you have direct experience with the subject, let me know about that, too. And don’t worry if you don’t have clips; first-time and unpublished writers are encouraged to pitch.
Anything you don’t want?
Anything best described as an op-ed. Dry policy writing and articles that are better suited for academic journals. Stiff argumentative pieces that preach to the choir rather than challenge or inform—“Therefore, it is imperative that we pass Medicare for All today”—and stories that only superficially engage with their subject.
Can you share some freelance pieces you’ve published to make some of this feel more concrete?
Can $500 a Month Change Your Life? This one takes a policy—a no-strings, supplemental universal basic income—and moves it away from wonky abstraction and into the space of real lived experience. (Also, the answer to the headline is yes—kind of.)
A New Home in a Country Shuttered by a Pandemic The pitch on this one was extremely clear about what the writer wanted to do: Talk to recently resettled refugees and refugee service organizations about how the pandemic has changed the already difficult work of finding financial footing and a sense of community in a new home.
Blow Up the Restaurant Industry and Start Over This one hits a few sweet spots for Sold Short. It features solid reporting that captures what’s screwed up, good data on how these burdens are shared unevenly, strong interviews that illustrate the stakes, and interesting ideas about what new models might look like.
Mothers Against Vampire Real Estate This piece is a nice hybrid of person-focused reporting—in this case, Moms 4 Housing and the affordability crisis in the Bay Area—and an ideas piece about the work of defeating the people and systems that create scarcity and mass suffering.
How much do you pay?
The rate will depend on the piece—how long it is, the difficulty of reporting involved, the time it will likely take to pull together. I don’t generally accept short takes on my desk, so most of my fees start at $400. Kill fee minimum is $50.
What’s the general process like?
I aspire to respond to every pitch I get—whether to say yes or no or to follow up with clarifying questions—but my inbox tends to get quite full, and things slip by me. If you want to follow up because you think I’ve missed your pitch, please do. If it’s taking too long and you want to pitch elsewhere, please do.
If a pitch is accepted, we’ll agree on a rate, word count, and deadline to file. I’m available to talk through or troubleshoot the piece during the reporting and writing process, so don’t feel like you have to work it all out in a vacuum.
Once you file, I try to be as transparent as possible about my editing timeline. If I am working on a few other pieces before I can get to yours, I will tell you that and include a window when I expect to have your edits back to you. In general, I think open communication is a good thing and helps us both respect each other’s time. Rinse and repeat until we’re done with the draft, and then I’ll let you know when it’s scheduled to run.
If anything changes, I’ll let you know as soon as I can.
Anything else?
Nope. Please pitch!


newrepublic--2020-11-24--The Damage Is the Point

The Damage Is the Point

President Donald Trump ’ s efforts to block or overturn the election results have failed at every turn .
His lawsuits are being dismissed by incredulous judges ; his personal campaign to short-circuit the Electoral College is going nowhere fast .
The list of Republican senators who have implicitly urged Trump to accept his loss is only growing : Pennsylvania ’ s Pat Toomey , Ohio ’ s Rob Portman , West Virginia ’ s Shelley Moore Capito .
“ When you are in public life , people remember the last thing you do , ” Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Some will remember Trump ’ s last acts in office because they ’ ll have to endure the aftermath .
Since the election , Trump has done incalculable damage to public confidence in the American democratic process .
He hasn ’ t persuaded the courts or the state legislatures that he was denied reelection by a massive ( and fictitious ) conspiracy of voter fraud and electoral manipulation .
But he has apparently convinced a broad swath of his followers that Biden ’ s victory is corrupt and illegitimate .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supporters say they think the November elections were run and administered well , and only 35 percent said they were “ very confident ” their vote was counted .
There is still no pathway for Trump to remain president after January 20 , 2021 .
But his ill-fated attempts to dispute the election serve another purpose .
The Republican Party , at an institutional level , wants voters ’ faith in American elections to be conditional .
GOP lawmakers have spent the last 20 years raising and amplifying fears about voter fraud , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American elections .
The chaos Trump has wrought from the 2020 election has handed them a ready-made pretext to go further next time .

These efforts reflect a broader Republican project that prioritized securing their own electoral power over reflecting the popular will. In 2019, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts can’t overturn partisan gerrymanders, effectively giving Republican-led state legislatures free rein to entrench themselves in office. The Trump administration also spent most of the last four years trying to structurally tilt the 2020 Census in its favor, first by adding a citizenship question that would reduce participation rates and then by trying to produce a count that excluded undocumented immigrants for reapportionment. The Supreme Court narrowly rejected the former in 2018; it will consider the latter in December.
The conservative legal movement has also produced judges who often resist efforts to make it easier for voters to cast a ballot and side with those who made it more difficult. While the federal district courts often ruled against Trump in election-related cases before November, for example, Republican nominees on the federal appellate courts turned them into far more favorable terrain for his litigation. And in the Supreme Court, it was the court’s conservative bloc that most often voted to block lower-court rulings that relaxed barriers to voting. Some of them, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even advanced radical legal theories to support their positions.
In a sense, Trump and his allies are following these trends to their logical conclusion. His lawyers asked judges to throw out or block statewide election results in multiple states, including Nevada and Pennsylvania. But Trumpworld’s ire all too often fell on major cities with large concentrations of Black voters, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, which they baselessly described as hotbeds of corruption and electoral fraud. At one point, local GOP officials in Wayne County, Michigan, even suggested certifying the results in the mostly white suburbs but not Detroit itself. It was not quite a call for the return of Jim Crow, but it strayed uncomfortably close to a case for Black voters’ ballots not to be counted outright.


newrepublic--2020-11-26--It’s a Perfect Year for a Non-Thanksgiving

It seems fitting that Thanksgiving would be canceled on this , the four-hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower ’ s voyage .
It ’ s historic disease event piled on top of historic disease event .
As David Walbert once put it , when white settlers came to the Americas , their diseases “ spread faster than European colonization.
” Eventually , “ Old World ” diseases like smallpox , diphtheria , and tuberculosis killed up to 90 percent of both continents ’ Indigenous populations .
Now that we ’ re in another Big Sickness , it ’ s a good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state was founded on a genocide partly engineered through pandemic .
Whether as a handmaiden to ethnic cleansing or as a pandemic whose denial is spawning wildly anti-democratic conspiracy theories , disease has a funny way of turning into a battle fought along political lines , while masquerading as natural disaster .
Like the ( real ) Thanksgiving story , the Covid-19 pandemic is a good reminder of the way our bodies get drawn into political conflicts .
When we hear a term like biopolitics , we don ’ t think of little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your meds has increased by a few cents .
But health authorities , insurance companies , and policymakers are constantly calculating and recalculating the relative worth of human life .
The bleak new reality of living through a pandemic has highlighted the political divides that attend all bodies living in America .

Gather is a very romantic film. But the romance of its production style feels—and this is often not the case in documentary film—firmly rooted in the subject at hand. For example, its cinematography is painterly and gorgeous; plants sway in low light, elderly fingers pluck a half-glimpsed leaf from the earth. Director of photography Renan Ozturk shot Meru (2015), the astonishing story of survival in the Himalayas in which he himself suffered a stroke while mountaineering, and his background in National Geographic work gives the film’s outdoor scenes that near-pastel loveliness. But it’s an appreciation of the American landscape not told from the perspective of the colonizers, for once, and that lends the many-colored landscapes of Gather a thrillingly subversive atmosphere.
As a holiday, Thanksgiving masks all this. The genocide of America’s Indigenous people sometimes seems like a crime so central and so foundational to the nation’s identity that it cannot be discussed productively: On the contrary, that kind of hopeless logic reinforces the myth that the genocide was a total success, that there is no chain of memory stretching back to the time before.
As Gather makes abundantly clear, advocates for food sovereignty are future-oriented individuals with big schemes in place for securing the lives that they want and their communities need. In Gather, physical pathologies are framed in new ways, not as inherent flaws but as the inevitable outcome of violent changes to the way Native communities have been permitted to relate to their own land. It’s an effective way to decentralize the stigma that poverty has attached to certain illnesses (diabetes and alcoholism certainly among them) and instead places human bonds, collective knowledge, and the optimism of annual renewal at the forefront.


newrepublic--2020-11-26--The Policy Mess Behind the Thanksgiving Feast

Strip away the myth-making and genocide erasure , and American Thanksgiving is a simple harvest festival , celebrated in various forms by cultures all over the world and across human history .
This year ’ s harvest—threshed , picked , slaughtered , butchered , packaged , shipped , and finally cooked—takes place under particularly precarious conditions , a warming atmosphere containing a novel , deadly pathogen .
As many are starting to realize , the feast isn ’ t a break from those realities ; from green beans to gravy , it ’ s a product of them .
Thanksgiving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diners , isn ’ t Thanksgiving without the turkey .
And cheap meat for all—or at least for far more people than previously had access to such luxuries—was one of the crowning achievements of American twentieth-century industrial agriculture .
Yet meat farming and processing is also one of the nation ’ s most troubled industries .
In the past few decades , global land clearing to cultivate crops for animal feeds has decimated global biodiversity .
Massive buildings crammed with hundreds of thousands of animals that serve as premier disease incubators , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have made the industrial meat supply chain a monumental pandemic risk , and produced a handful of near-misses on the road to Covid-19 .
Just as monoculture of a single crop makes an entire harvest vulnerable to disease , when livestock sectors engineer the system to process billions of near-identical genetic specimens in perpetuity—99 percent of the world ’ s turkeys , for example , are derived from a single breed—mass production comes with terrifying vulnerabilities .
“ As corporations raze forests , slaughter animals , and spew out greenhouse gases , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ May , “ they ’ re bringing us closer to a future that could well produce outbreaks even deadlier than the coronavirus pandemic .
”

Up until a few years ago, the scientific community presumed glyphosate—the chemical in Roundup—to be harmless to insects and other animals “because it targets an enzyme only found in plants and microorganisms,” as researchers from University of Texas at Austin put it in a 2018 paper. But those same researchers found that “most bee gut bacteria contain the enzyme targeted by glyphosate,” warning that “exposing bees to glyphosate alters the bee gut community and increases susceptibility to infection by opportunistic pathogens,” exposing “a possible role of this chemical in colony decline.” Colony decline, in turn, endangers future harvests, which currently depend on rotating, rented supersquads of honey bee pollinizers for fruit and vegetables. The worst part is that glyphosate is certainly less harmful than chemicals like dicamba and 2,4-D which, as Roundup’s efficacy begins to flag, are being recirculated into the agronomic system.
As the effects of these unsustainable practices and global warming accumulate, harvests are growing more uncertain. Thanksgiving’s traditions of sloth and excess may soon be a whimsical memory. But policy helped create these problems; slowly, policy can unwind them. A reinvigorated regulatory state could ban harmful chemicals in the name of human and environmental safety, break up meat oligopolies, and speed investigations and prosecutions for price fixing and other misbehavior. The Department of Labor could do more to protect agricultural and meat-processing workers and their unions. An agriculture-focused trust-busting office gutted during the Trump years needs to be restored and empowered. And the Environmental Protection Agency needs to target industrial animal operations for restrictions under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The Department of Agriculture can retire millions of acres of land not necessary for food, in the quick stroke of a pen making incredible progress rebuilding biodiversity in prairie and desert ecosystems we all depend on. And California needs water rationing that prioritizes human subsistence over the profits of a single family of billionaires. The possibilities are endless and inspiring.
Like other environmental crises, the history of bad American agricultural policy is filled with racism. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill this week that would reallocate farmland to Black farmers at an unprecedented scale, reversing a trend more than a century long of discrimination and violence, aided and abetted by the federal government. Just Tuesday, a new study estimated that 1 percent of the world’s landowners—the same corporations that create and profit from pandemics and climate change—dominate 70 percent of global farmland.


newrepublic--2020-11-26--How Weird Was Frank Zappa?

How Weird Was Frank Zappa?

In October 1978 , in what remains one of the worst episodes in the program ’ s history , Frank Zappa appeared on Saturday Night Live .
The rock musician and controversialist worked through a trio of musical numbers , delivered a flat monologue , and hammed his way through a Coneheads sketch .
The episode ’ s centerpiece was a bit called “ Night on Freak Mountain , ” which saw Zappa , playing himself , ducking ruthless record execs in a mountaintop retreat where a group of hippies ( Dan Aykroyd , John Belushi , and Laraine Newman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re in the presence of weirdo , guitar-god greatness , the hippies offer Zappa joints and magic mushroom tea .
He demurs ; he doesn ’ t like drugs .
“ Frank Zappa doesn ’ t do drugs ?
!
” Aykroyd explodes .
Belushi ’ s character flips out , smashing his meaty fists against the prop walls of the cheapo set .
It ’ s an exasperating piece of late-night comedy , even by SNL standards , and Zappa was no fan of it himself .
As recounted in Alex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he thought “ the whole skit sucked.
” And who could argue ?
It runs its one joke deep into the ground : that Frank Zappa , while writing far-out rock music and appearing unconventional , with his long hair and ( literally ) trademarked facial hair configuration , his penchant for bell-bottoms and neckerchiefs , was actually pretty straight .
Despite all appearances to the contrary , he was no avatar of the official counterculture .
Born in Baltimore in 1940 , Zappa was into his mid-twenties by 1965 , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year to be a hippie.
” It was also the year Zappa and his band , a blues-rock outfit called the Mothers of Invention , were commanding attention in L.A. for confrontational stage shows that straddled the line between dorky comedy-rock and Artaudian theatre of cruelty .
Both Zappa and Thompson viewed the emerging counterculture with suspicion .
Thompson lamented a lack of political engagement , observing that students “ who were once angry activists began to lie back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a similar contempt .
“ I ’ m hippy and I ’ m trippy and I ’ m gypsy on my own , ” the Mothers of Invention coo on “ Who Needs the Peace Corps ?
” ; “ I ’ ll stay a week and get the crabs and take the bus back home .
”

In 1967, Zappa and his band relocated from L.A. to New York, escaping the artistically gentrifying Sunset Strip for the relative obscurity of Manhattan. There, businessmen in rolled-up shirtsleeves were still mass-producing pop hits at the Brill Building, and the nascent rock scene had a demonstrably artier bent. The Mothers installed themselves in the dingy Garrick Theater for an extended residency, honing both their increasingly complex music and their progressively confrontational antics. One notable performance from this period had Zappa inviting a group of U.S. Marines onstage to dismember a plastic doll dressed up as a Vietnamese baby. Another saw concertgoers sprayed with whipped cream through a hose fed through the hind quarters of a toy giraffe. As Zappa put it, in a quote immortalized on a poster enjoying pride of place in my teenage bedroom: “You can’t write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”
The extent to which you find such stunts meaningfully confrontational, crass, or merely juvenile likely boils down to personal taste. Not everyone was impressed. Lou Reed lambasted Zappa as “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life” and “a loser.” (Reed would subsequently honor Zappa at his 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.) What’s undeniable is that these performances and performers were unique. Zappa and his band distinguished themselves from the popular, and profitable, peace-and-love set. And that NYC residency earned the band plenty of faithful fellow travelers—among them Ruth Underwood, a young timpanist studying at Juilliard. “All of that,” she explains in Zappa, “just crashed and burned when I heard my first Frank Zappa concert.” She ditched her Juilliard baroque composition classes and joined his band, enjoying a lengthy tenure as a percussionist, contributing virtuoso playing to Zappa’s run of remarkable mid-’70s records. From that fateful encounter, Underwood saw Zappa as he saw himself: not as a rock musician or provocateur but a “living composer.”
If there’s a single idea of Zappa that Alex Winter’s Zappa propagates, it’s this one. The film develops an image of him as a self-taught composer of modernist music, in the style of Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse, but forced by the demands of the marketplace to ply his trade in the guise of a rock star. He was the sort of guy who talks, incessantly, about The Work. The difficulty of that work seemed inseparable from his personality. And nothing could distract him from it.


newrepublic--2020-11-27--The Supreme Court Has to Choose Between Trump and the Nation’s Founders

When is an immigrant not a person ?
According to President Donald Trump , it ’ s whenever the executive branch says so .
The president has spent the past four years promulgating this idea for the purposes of excluding undocumented immigrants from the numbers used to calculate each state ’ s representation in Congress .
Even though he is on his way out of office , this notion may become enshrined into law by the Supreme Court , which will hear oral arguments on a key case , Trump v. New York , on Monday .
How the Roberts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of power in the legislature and ensure that some measure of Trumpism endures long into the Biden administration .
The Constitution requires the president to count the “ whole number of persons in each State ” through the decennial census .
Congress then uses that number to apportion each state ’ s seats in the House of Representatives and , by extension , its votes in the Electoral College .
The Constitution ’ s framers considered but rejected counting “ citizens ” or “ voters , ” fearing those terms could be manipulated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advantage .
Instead , they chose “ persons ” —a word that would seem to have no wriggle room .
Nonetheless , the Trump administration will try to get the Supreme Court to agree that undocumented immigrants are not “ persons ” who must be included in the count .
Should the president succeed , he will alter the very basis of our representational democracy—a system that has fully counted all of the people living in the United States since the abolition of slavery put an end to treating slaves as three-fifths of @ @ @

When is an immigrant not a person? According to President Donald Trump, it’s whenever the executive branch says so. The president has spent the past four years promulgating this idea for the purposes of excluding undocumented immigrants from the numbers used to calculate each state’s representation in Congress. Even though he is on his way out of office, this notion may become enshrined into law by the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments on a key case, Trump v. New York, on Monday. How the Roberts court rules could substantially tilt the balance of power in the legislature and ensure that some measure of Trumpism endures long into the Biden administration.
The Constitution requires the president to count the “whole number of persons in each State” through the decennial census. Congress then uses that number to apportion each state’s seats in the House of Representatives and, by extension, its votes in the Electoral College. The Constitution’s framers considered but rejected counting “citizens” or “voters,” fearing those terms could be manipulated by state or federal governments for political advantage. Instead, they chose “persons”—a word that would seem to have no wriggle room.


newrepublic--2020-11-27--How “The Queen’s Gambit” Reimagined Chess

In 2002 , an American player named Jennifer Shahade , who bears a more than passing similarity to Beth Harmon , became the youngest women ’ s U.S. chess champion in history .
Subsequently , she was awarded the title Woman Grandmaster by the international chess organization , FIDE ( the acronym is French ) .
Like Harmon , Shahade was once glamorously featured on the cover of America ’ s preeminent chess magazine .
She too has a flamboyant head of red hair—albeit less scrutinized than Harmon ’ s much-discussed crowning glory—and like the character in the show , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ embracing fashion and travel .
She plays the game with Harmon ’ s same attacking style , which is a significant plot point in the story .
To be clear , Shahade can ’ t be the inspiration for the character , as she was only three when Tevis ’ s novel first appeared .
She even recalls not finishing the book—despite the similarities to her own story—when she first found it amid the teenage throes of her early chess obsession .
Shahade has become an important face of the game , challenging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and conservative politics .
The cover of her first book , Chess Bitch : Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport , featured the author posing in a pink wig , a pink spaghetti-strap top , a pink scarf , and furry pink gloves , and her second book , examining the games of prominent female players , was entitled Play Like a Girl .
In addition , Shahade has staged a number of chess-themed art installation pieces and events , performed or conducted in the spirit of artist Marcel Duchamp , for whom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the subject of Shahade ’ s third , co-authored book .
Alongside Shahade ’ s own efforts , several other changes in the world of chess have broadened the game ’ s appeal .
The current World Champion , Magnus Carlsen , a 29-year-old Norwegian with a dry wit and a willingness to offer kind words for his opponents , has served as a much more attractive figurehead for the game than many of his predecessors .
( Anyone convinced that chess is a toy should watch the first five minutes of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
The St. Louis chess club achieved international status as a venue for major tournaments and launched philanthropic efforts to stress the game ’ s supposed intellectual benefits .
A Chess in the Schools program contributed to the recognition of the game as an art , as well as a sport , making it fundable from sources that were previously unavailable to it .
The U.S .
Chess Federation became a 501c3 nonprofit , representing a change in mission from promoting chess to improving people ’ s lives through the game .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ featuring a robust lineup of male and female commentators on tournaments covered live from all over the world , have revolutionized how the game is consumed by fans .
In Fischer ’ s day—and even 20 years ago—it was rare to see grand masters actually play chess .
Today , it ’ s possible to observe the world ’ s leading players virtually around the clock .
Even the pandemic may have contributed to the popularity of both chess and The Queen ’ s Gambit .
If too much time at home has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which dedication and perseverance is duly rewarded , then chess offers the opportunity for both intellectual challenge and a welcoming community , at a time when those things are difficult to find .

The chess community in The Queen’s Gambit is far more benign than the hostile, madness-inducing, chess-as-battlefield-of-the-Cold War image that has cemented itself in the American psyche.
Not accidentally, I think, Fischer has been excised from the world of The Queen’s Gambit. The prodigious rise of Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is a teenager in the 1960s, would have overlapped perfectly with Fischer’s rise toward the world championship. But he’s completely absent from the story—obliquely referenced only once when one of Harmon’s love interests, Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), is referred to by the wrong name. Instead, the show is imagining the history that might have unfurled had Fischer not been a paranoid, misogynistic, antisemitic cultist (it’s really too much to go into in detail) but rather an impassioned, inquisitive, and charismatic young woman fixed on beating back her demons and excelling at the game.
In flashback, Harmon miraculously survives her mother’s desperate murder-suicide plot, and in the first episode, she is adopted at about 12 years old. The stories of both her birth family and her adopted family are instructive in just how determinedly men can attempt to prevent women from expressing ambition and achieving independence. Her birth mother is a Ph.D. in mathematics, and her adopted mother is a talented pianist—math and music are an intellectual stone’s throw from chess—yet each suffered a husband who ridiculed and abandoned her. To break into the chess world, Harmon must penetrate a layer of midcentury misogyny—claims that women don’t play chess or don’t stand a chance against male players—but once she does so, the game offers her a benign father figure and provides her with her first experiences of true kindness and respect. Another female player, whom she has just defeated, comes to her rescue when she has her first period. In subsequent tournaments, the male chess players she dispatches react with awe rather than anger.
The show owes not a little to the Pygmalion–My Fair Lady story, in that chess itself is Harmon’s tutor: Through her stoic chess teacher and the blocky aesthetic of the game, she learns manners and develops both her critical faculties and an appreciation of abstract beauty. And eventually, chess shows her that men—in the form of gentlemanly Russian grand masters—can be steely and competitive, yet also capable of looking past ideology and gender to value raw genius. In short, she finds that the arena of chess is a true meritocracy.


newrepublic--2020-11-27--How Does Ben Smith Sleep at Night?

How Does Ben Smith Sleep at Night?

Let ’ s be honest : Ben Smith is the best media columnist The New York Times has ever had .
He instantly surpassed his poor predecessor upon landing from BuzzFeed earlier this year .
He has even eclipsed the legendary David Carr , whose lovely turns of phrase and grizzled wisdom are no match for the blunt force of Smith ’ s copy .
I don ’ t recall lying in bed on a Sunday night thinking , with the anticipation of a tiger who is about to be fed , “ It ’ s David Carr time.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become a weekly ritual—sad , pathetic creature of journalism that I am .
That ’ s because Smith provides scoops , which in his assessment is the only currency worth trading .
“ If you ’ re not breaking news , you don ’ t have any credibility , ” he told New York magazine in September .
What kind of scoops are we talking about , though ?
Take one of his recent columns , on the journalist Joe Biden trusts the most : Jon Meacham , a former Newsweek editor .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ run in Peter Kaplan ’ s New York Observer— “ Get Me Meacham !
Biden Brings Back the the Media ’ s Good Old Days ” —Smith ’ s article opens with an anecdote of Meacham trying to hire Smith at Newsweek : I was by then not so sure about the future of print , but Mr. Meacham , the magazine ’ s editor in chief , told me that his corporate masters had a plan : Newsweek would rid itself of most of its existing , middlebrow subscribers and charge the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The plan didn ’ t make much sense to me and , obviously , did not work .
The next year , Mr. Meacham , once described as the “ oldest 34-year-old journalist in the world ” ( this was praise in the world of newsweeklies ) —left to write and teach at Vanderbilt .
This paragraph is indicative of Smith ’ s style , down to the sloppy em-dash in the final sentence ( where is its partner ? )
.
It takes us into the room of a ( sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us his naivete , which in turn reveals something about an actually powerful man , Joe Biden , whose worldview is informed by the addled utterances of the country ’ s normiest op-ed writers—the fig leaf of a nut graf that covers what is otherwise outright gossip .
And , crucially , it features Smith betraying Meacham ’ s trust .

I would say that he has made his peace with the morally indefensible, but I don’t get the sense that there was much of a struggle in Smith’s soul. There is something about his smiling baby face that is terrifying. They say that the stupidest thing you can do is agree to talk to Isaac Chotiner. I say it is Ben Smith. At least Chotiner meets you on the field of battle. Smith plays a game in which he holds all the cards and his opponent doesn’t even know he’s playing.
This has long been his M.O. In a more innocent time he got in a bit of trouble for reporting about an off-the-record dinner with Uber executives in which no one had cleared the off-the-record terms with him. So he acted as if it was on the record and told his readers what he heard. (The scoop was that an executive said the company should hire opposition researchers to investigate its critics in the media.) As Smith told New York (in a separate profile), “At some point, I was like, ‘Well, this will be a problem for you if it becomes public.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, we would keep it secret.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you just told me.’” How can you not love it? Hilariously, the person who invited Smith to this “influencer” dinner was a deeply embarrassed Michael Wolff, who afterward scolded Smith for being a “gotcha political blogger” who uses “a stern, official-sounding voice, censorious and moralistic,” a description that rings 100 percent false. Wolff, of course, would go on to practice Smith’s smash-and-grab brand of journalism at Donald Trump’s White House, profiting handsomely as a result.
Uber, Donald Trump—these are appropriate targets to betray without remorse, as Malcolm would have it, because they are powerful. Here is how we in this industry defend the indefensible. “Every beat is basically just power,” Smith told New York, and indeed he has used his perch at the Times to challenge and needle powerful people and institutions, including the Times itself. (“[M]y writing about the Times while on its payroll brings with it all sorts of potential conflicts of interest and is generally a bit of a nightmare,” he has charmingly conceded.)


newrepublic--2020-11-25--The Democrats’ Maddening Cowardice Is Carrying Over Into the Biden Era

None of this should come as any surprise .
Democrats also intentionally dragged their heels on Trump ’ s impeachment for as long as they could , even after the long-awaited and vaunted Mueller investigation produced evidence of obstruction of justice , on precisely the same grounds : Wait for Republicans to jump in , and the party will come off looking better for its patience , for avoiding legal messiness , and for establishing a bipartisan front .
“ Impeachment is so divisive to the country , ” Pelosi told The Washington Post in March 2019 , “ that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and overwhelming and bipartisan , I don ’ t think we should go down that path because it divides the country.
” Months later , her hand was forced by the revelation Trump had tried to coerce Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden .
There ’ s nothing Democrats can do—or avoid doing—to bridge the partisan divide .
Our very situation now is proof of this .
Nothing about Biden ’ s pitch for unity and bipartisanship has discouraged the right from believing or pretending to believe that he , and maybe the Venezuelans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the American people .
But the dream of comity lives on : Polls have shown that the public and Democrats especially are still invested in bipartisanship as a political value , and revulsion for Trump hasn ’ t quite rubbed off on the Republican Party as a whole , particularly among the moderate suburbanites who swung so dramatically for Biden in the election .
With Trump gone , these voters could swing back toward a more ordinary Republican just as dramatically—a possibility foreshadowed not only by Republicans ’ surprisingly good performance down-ballot this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blue-state Republican moderates like Massachusetts ’ s Charlie Baker and Maryland ’ s Larry Hogan .
And the erosion in Democratic support among Hispanic and Black voters will obviously remain cause for concern .
If notable shares of each were willing to back Trump despite his overt bigotry , how might more subdued conservatives perform in the years ahead ?
The opposition party will end its term out of the White House without having done much to engender sustained opposition to the GOP .
Now that task will fall to activists on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ played out in the background of the month ’ s events should be instructive for them .
The legal profession has been roiled since the election by a movement against the firms Porter Wright and Jones Day , which have been representing the Trump campaign in its frivolous lawsuits .
Lawyers were subjected to pressure campaigns , law students pledged not to work at either firm , and the specter was raised of a boycott against Jones Day ’ s other major clients , including General Motors .
There were even pickets outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this has seemingly yielded results .
Earlier this month , Porter Wright abandoned one of Trump ’ s lawsuits , and Jones Day has reportedly decided not to take on any more election cases .

None of this should come as any surprise. Democrats also intentionally dragged their heels on Trump’s impeachment for as long as they could, even after the long-awaited and vaunted Mueller investigation produced evidence of obstruction of justice, on precisely the same grounds: Wait for Republicans to jump in, and the party will come off looking better for its patience, for avoiding legal messiness, and for establishing a bipartisan front. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country,” Pelosi told The Washington Post in March 2019, “that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country.” Months later, her hand was forced by the revelation Trump had tried to coerce Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden.
There’s nothing Democrats can do—or avoid doing—to bridge the partisan divide. Our very situation now is proof of this. Nothing about Biden’s pitch for unity and bipartisanship has discouraged the right from believing or pretending to believe that he, and maybe the Venezuelans, have perpetrated a massive fraud against the American people. But the dream of comity lives on: Polls have shown that the public and Democrats especially are still invested in bipartisanship as a political value, and revulsion for Trump hasn’t quite rubbed off on the Republican Party as a whole, particularly among the moderate suburbanites who swung so dramatically for Biden in the election. With Trump gone, these voters could swing back toward a more ordinary Republican just as dramatically—a possibility foreshadowed not only by Republicans’ surprisingly good performance down-ballot this year but in the sky-high popularity of blue-state Republican moderates like Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Maryland’s Larry Hogan. And the erosion in Democratic support among Hispanic and Black voters will obviously remain cause for concern. If notable shares of each were willing to back Trump despite his overt bigotry, how might more subdued conservatives perform in the years ahead?
The opposition party will end its term out of the White House without having done much to engender sustained opposition to the GOP. Now that task will fall to activists on the outside. One drama that’s played out in the background of the month’s events should be instructive for them. The legal profession has been roiled since the election by a movement against the firms Porter Wright and Jones Day, which have been representing the Trump campaign in its frivolous lawsuits. Lawyers were subjected to pressure campaigns, law students pledged not to work at either firm, and the specter was raised of a boycott against Jones Day’s other major clients, including General Motors. There were even pickets outside both firms’ offices. And all of this has seemingly yielded results. Earlier this month, Porter Wright abandoned one of Trump’s lawsuits, and Jones Day has reportedly decided not to take on any more election cases.


newrepublic--2020-11-30--The Elderly Trapped in Bronxwood

The Elderly Trapped in Bronxwood

Varahn had implied to Glenda that she was staying in the Bronx .
In reality , she was moving to suburban Maryland .
She had signed the lease for a one-bedroom apartment in a senior living community just a short drive away from her daughter ’ s house .
It was everything that Bronxwood was not—serene and quiet , lush with greenery .
She had told Glenda only half of the story because she couldn ’ t quite believe her good fortune .
“ I feel so sorry because some of them are waiting there thinking that they will someday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ If it wasn ’ t for my associations ” —the support from her family , her earnings from the salon— “ I would be stuck there , too.
” Her family was relieved about her departure , but Varahn remained uneasy .
With a room of her own , she thought , or even a different roommate , she probably would have stayed .
As it was , the likely return of the virus in the winter frightened her .
When she packed up her belongings , she felt as if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had once imagined for herself .
“ By now , I would have been running for city council , if this virus didn ’ t happen , ” she said .
“ So I ’ m saying to myself , well , you know , that wasn ’ t in God ’ s plan.
” Though she kept her move a secret , one resident spotted her carrying boxes in the hallway , and asked her , “ Are you just going to leave us like that ?
” It was the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months .
In a handwritten letter Varahn gave to Bronxwood ’ s administrators before she left , she expressed her desire to remain president from afar until it was safe to hold an election .
She had planned to retire there , the letter said , yet it was impossible to do so under the current circumstances .
She expected Mr. Stern , or at least his secretary , to call to offer his regrets , but she never got a response .
It made her feel as though nothing she had done @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lived there at all .
This article is a collaboration between The New Republic and ProPublica , the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization .

Varahn was eating three meals a day on a folding table at the edge of her bed. Her feet were swollen. Her back hurt.
It wasn’t just the forced isolation that discouraged her. Everything was happening on some sort of screen, and the tedious video engagements and text messages often left her frustrated. In her class for first-time campaigners, which had migrated to Zoom, the connection was always faltering, making it difficult to understand what anyone was trying to say.
At other times, she wasn’t isolated enough. Her roommate rose at dawn and sold loose cigarettes throughout the day. People were always stopping by. Whenever Varahn was on a call or at a virtual meeting, the roommate muttered under her breath or cursed sarcastically. Once, the noise was so disruptive to the class that the instructor told Varahn to mute herself, which she found humiliating. What would have been merely an inconvenient pairing in normal times had under quarantine become an oppressively intimate arrangement. There was also the problem of Varahn’s older sister, Childris, whose heart was starting to fail. The grief put a constant pressure on her days. All this made it hard to concentrate, and she soon fell behind on her studies. So many things about her path to city council were uncertain now anyway. Was a person of her age expected to knock on doors? Would she have to campaign through a computer screen?
Varahn began searching for a way to reclaim her freedom. She asked Mr. Stern for a room of her own. As far as she could tell, there was plenty of space in the building. A private accommodation could double as a little office for the council, she reasoned—somewhere that residents could feel comfortable speaking to her. But management never acted on her request. Victoria Kelley, a former jazz singer who had lived at Bronxwood for three years, suspected that Varahn’s battle for the clothing allowance had turned administrators against her. Such retaliation is not unheard of, according to advocates who work with residents at adult care facilities. “If you don’t have someone on the council to fight for you, nothing gets done, but Varahn did fight,” Victoria told me. “Some of the naysayers got jealous.”


newrepublic--2020-11-30--The Clapping Stopped, but the Risks to Health Care Workers Didn’t

At 50 years old , and with three kids , Brígida Vidal struggles to keep up with the mountains of dirty linen she is expected to sort through each day at the industrial laundry plant where she works in New Jersey .
Unitex , where Vidal is employed , is responsible for disinfecting patient bedsheets , gowns , and other linens for New York City area hospitals , including NYC Health + Hospitals , by far the largest municipal health care system in the United States .
The stress of the job—and urgency of the work—has only increased as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vidal , the soil room where she spends most of her time is poorly ventilated and social distancing is seldom enforced .
In April , as New York emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic , with nearly 220,000 people in the tristate area having been infected and more than 9,000 recorded deaths , Vidal began showing symptoms consistent with Covid-19 .
The union has been in battles at various Unitex facilities for years , but for Vidal , the pandemic was the last straw .
“ I ’ m going out on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take our health insurance away and they want to take our bonus away , ” she said .
These things were the difference , she felt , between securing her and her family ’ s future or living in a perpetual state of insecurity .
On November 18 , Vidal joined scores of mostly immigrant women hospital laundry workers employed by Unitex for a two-day unfair labor practices strike , over what they claim to be the company ’ s numerous illegal threats to fire workers who go on strike .
Workers at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vernon , New York , also walked off the job to honor the picket line .
Negotiations between the company and the Laundry , Distribution , and Food Service Joint Board , Workers United/SEIU , the labor union representing the workers , broke down during the previous weeks , after Unitex continued to push the conversion of the current pension plan into a 401 ( k ) for new hires and proved unwilling to meet worker demands about safer working conditions at the company ’ s Perth Amboy , New Jersey , plant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

At 50 years old, and with three kids, Brígida Vidal struggles to keep up with the mountains of dirty linen she is expected to sort through each day at the industrial laundry plant where she works in New Jersey. Unitex, where Vidal is employed, is responsible for disinfecting patient bedsheets, gowns, and other linens for New York City area hospitals, including NYC Health + Hospitals, by far the largest municipal health care system in the United States. The stress of the job—and urgency of the work—has only increased as the pandemic has taken hold. According to Vidal, the soil room where she spends most of her time is poorly ventilated and social distancing is seldom enforced. In April, as New York emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic, with nearly 220,000 people in the tristate area having been infected and more than 9,000 recorded deaths, Vidal began showing symptoms consistent with Covid-19.
The union has been in battles at various Unitex facilities for years, but for Vidal, the pandemic was the last straw. “I’m going out on strike because they are threatening us to take our health insurance away and they want to take our bonus away,” she said. These things were the difference, she felt, between securing her and her family’s future or living in a perpetual state of insecurity.


newrepublic--2020-11-30--The U.S. Is Addicted to Bad Middle East Policy

, and particularly conservative , media has largely ignored this fact , instead presenting Iran as on the verge of deploying nuclear weapons and contributing to regional proliferation—unlike Israel , which has dozens of unacknowledged nuclear weapons that could reach Iran .
The reporting from outlets like The Wall Street Journal follows a formula that ’ s been repeated with little revision for the last 20 years : Iran is always a year or less away from enriching enough uranium to make a bomb , at which point it may be another six months or year away from solving issues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fit on one of their missiles .
Like the deservedly mocked , which described U.S. success in Iraq as always six months away , Western hawks see Iran as ever on the verge of deploying a weapon it seems to have little interest in developing .
( It ’ s also doubtful that Iran would take the self-annihilating step of launching a nuclear weapon .
While Iran is an anti-democratic theocracy , its government behaves less like a millennarian cult than like any mature—if rhetorically bellicose—state acting out of political self-interest . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ approach to Iran—that is , a return to one of Obama ’ s few certifiable foreign policy successes , the JCPOA agreement .
Reestablishing the deal will involve repealing U.S. sanctions that have devastated Iran ’ s economy and especially its medical system in the midst of a global pandemic .
Biden may be able to accomplish this through executive orders , as Iran ’ s hopeful foreign minister in an interview , but he ’ ll have to contend with numerous countervailing forces , from Netanyahu to intractable Republicans to hawks in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem to be destined for his Cabinet and National Security Council .
And after four years of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo torching what remained of U.S. diplomacy , it may be hard to convince Iran ’ s leaders , especially whichever conservatives may win the election planned for June 2021 , that the U.S. is capable of abiding by its agreements and restraining Israeli aggression .
To insert the mandatory caveat to any piece on this topic : Iran is an illiberal regime that jails and tortures dissidents , funds militant groups @ @ @ @ @ @ @ responsible for terrorist attacks on multiple continents .
It is not a virtuous or defensible leadership .
That being said , not just the lawful but also probably the more successful long-term strategy ( not to mention the more compassionate strategy toward Iran ’ s millions of civilians ) would be for the U.S. to abandon its belligerent approach , instead demilitarizing and normalizing its relationship with Iran , a country with whom it shares a number of interests , including the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan .
That U.S. invasions of these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s regional influence is an ironic result that American hawks—whose credibility should be considered exhausted—must learn to accept .

The establishment , and particularly conservative, media has largely ignored this fact, instead presenting Iran as on the verge of deploying nuclear weapons and contributing to regional proliferation—unlike Israel, which has dozens of unacknowledged nuclear weapons that could reach Iran. The reporting from outlets like The Wall Street Journal follows a formula that’s been repeated with little revision for the last 20 years: Iran is always a year or less away from enriching enough uranium to make a bomb, at which point it may be another six months or year away from solving issues associated with assembling a warhead that can fit on one of their missiles. Like the deservedly mocked Friedman Unit , which described U.S. success in Iraq as always six months away, Western hawks see Iran as ever on the verge of deploying a weapon it seems to have little interest in developing. (It’s also doubtful that Iran would take the self-annihilating step of launching a nuclear weapon. While Iran is an anti-democratic theocracy, its government behaves less like a millennarian cult than like any mature—if rhetorically bellicose—state acting out of political self-interest.)
The incoming Biden administration promises a new approach to Iran—that is, a return to one of Obama’s few certifiable foreign policy successes, the JCPOA agreement. Reestablishing the deal will involve repealing U.S. sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy and especially its medical system in the midst of a global pandemic. Biden may be able to accomplish this through executive orders, as Iran’s hopeful foreign minister recently claimed in an interview, but he’ll have to contend with numerous countervailing forces, from Netanyahu to intractable Republicans to hawks in his own party, some of whom seem to be destined for his Cabinet and National Security Council. And after four years of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo torching what remained of U.S. diplomacy, it may be hard to convince Iran’s leaders, especially whichever conservatives may win the election planned for June 2021, that the U.S. is capable of abiding by its agreements and restraining Israeli aggression.
To insert the mandatory caveat to any piece on this topic: Iran is an illiberal regime that jails and tortures dissidents, funds militant groups across the Middle East, and is responsible for terrorist attacks on multiple continents. It is not a virtuous or defensible leadership. That being said, not just the lawful but also probably the more successful long-term strategy (not to mention the more compassionate strategy toward Iran’s millions of civilians) would be for the U.S. to abandon its belligerent approach, instead demilitarizing and normalizing its relationship with Iran, a country with whom it shares a number of interests, including the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. That U.S. invasions of these two countries have only increased Iran’s regional influence is an ironic result that American hawks—whose credibility should be considered exhausted—must learn to accept.


newrepublic--2020-12-01--How to Cover a Normal Cabinet

How to Cover a Normal Cabinet

President-elect Joe Biden promised a return to normal on the campaign trail .
His early picks for Cabinet and other high-level administration positions have , in their own way , delivered on that promise .
There is nothing close to the anthropomorphic conflicts of interest that studded President Donald Trump ’ s Cabinet , such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos , Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross , or Postmaster General Louis DeJoy .
The last four years have been defined by a well-grounded fear that Cabinet secretaries , like the president himself , were prioritizing their own economic interests over their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ natural that underlings would happily follow the retrograde example set by the man at the top of the executive branch .
Biden ’ s early nominations and announced appointments , by contrast , have been predictable ; compared to the brazen corruption of the last four years ’ worth of self-dealers and wayward leaders , his picks are downright boring .
Many , like John Kerry ( special envoy for climate ) , Antony Blinken ( secretary of state ) , Jake Sullivan ( national security adviser ) , and Janet Yellen ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Obama administration and are fully wired in to the Democratic establishment .
The Biden administration is shaping up to be something that looks a lot like the Obama administration , at least when it ’ s not resembling what many thought a Hillary Clinton administration would look like .
But an escape from Gilded Age–level corruption and a return to Democratic business as usual is still charged with serious ethical and political questions , even if they don ’ t rise to the operatic heights of the Trump administration ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ navigating this space is also fraught .
There ’ s no reason to give Joe Biden a pass simply for being significantly less contemptible than his predecessor—though many , it seems , would like that .
But properly covering Biden ’ s appointments will require properly contextualizing them .

Biden’s appointments have very much participated in society. Ron Klain has spent years working in venture capital; incoming senior adviser Cedric Richmond was a top recipient of money from oil companies in Congress; Neera Tanden, whom Biden announced he intended to nominate to run the Office of Management and Budget, ran a think tank that received money from Wall Street and foreign governments (and has tweeted more times than anyone in their right mind should).
Biden’s inner circle doesn’t seem to include comical self-dealers like Scott Pruitt or flamboyant criminals like Paul Manafort. Nevertheless, there is no defensible reason to ask journalists to stand down from their duty to give Biden’s nominees a thorough going-over and raise questions about their ties to powerful industries like finance and oil. Being less corrupt than Wilbur Ross should not earn you a pass. The last four years have shown why digging into the ties between government officials and the private sector is necessary. The New York Times’ editor Cliff Levy was ratioed on Twitter for suggesting, “We will scrutinize the incoming administration just as thoroughly as we did the outgoing one.” This was seen by many readers who struggle with plain-English sentences that Levy was committing his paper to holding Biden to a tougher standard than Trump.
It’s not unreasonable to worry that the press, in an attempt to equalize the intensity of its coverage of the Trump administration with its scrutiny of the Biden White House, might badly overcorrect and start making mountains out of molehills. But we should allow the press to attempt to apply the lessons of the last four years—as well as those gleaned from the presidencies that preceded the Trump administration. The coverage of Biden’s picks can only benefit from the context of what came before: the better for news consumers to understand how a Tony Blinken is different from a Scott Pruitt—and how the nomination fights that will follow will be fought on different terrain.


newrepublic--2020-12-01--How Trees Made Us Human

How Trees Made Us Human

All great apes use wood as a material ; humans specifically use it for fuel .
Again , our bodies tell the tale .
Human mouths and digestive tracts are fitted for soft , flame-cooked foods .
Our atypically large brains , in fact , depend on the energy subsidy that comes from cooking .
Ennos notes that we possess another “ extremely unusual trait for terrestrial mammals ” : hairlessness .
Not having a pelt helps you avoid disease-bearing bedbugs , lice , and fleas , but it makes you cold .
This evolutionary trade-off was presumably worthwhile for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wooden shelters and fires .
And they did , all the time , even if wood doesn ’ t feature heavily in our stereotypes of the Paleolithic .
What do you call an era when people hunted with wooden spears , dug up roots and bulbs with sticks , cooked their food on wooden poles , fed their fires with logs and branches , lived in wooden huts , and used rocks to scrape animal hides ?
The Stone Age , apparently .
Ennos rolls his eyes at this fixation with minerals .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ early humans ’ stone scrapers because much of what they did with those crude implements was craft wood .
In fact , he continues , most early technological advances didn ’ t replace wood so much as allow new uses of it .
Copper and bronze permitted the manufacture of plank ships and wooden wheels .
Iron gave rise to barrels , longships , and large wooden buildings .
One of the most famous vestiges of prehistoric times is Stonehenge , a circular grouping of hefty megaliths .
But what , Ennos asks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ monument two miles away ?
Archaeological evidence suggests it must have been an “ impressive structure , ” too—slightly larger in diameter than Stonehenge .
Yet all of that wood has rotted away in the intervening four millennia , leaving only post holes , which are today marked with uninspiring concrete stumps .
It ’ s a fitting metaphor .
Up until a century or two ago , the human environment was nearly all wood .
It ’ s just that the wood has decomposed , leaving only the stones and metals that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This mineral-centered scheme of history divides neatly into epochs , emphasizing the stepwise progression from one to the next .
But it overlooks the deep continuities that until quite recently have tied us to prehistoric times , making it in turn hard to see how unprecedented the modern age has been .

It is strange, when you think about it, that the leading metropolises in one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries should have been fashioned out of humanity’s oldest building material. But we rarely think about it. Wood has a way of slipping from view. We characterize historical epochs by their most advanced materials and energy sources: the Stone, Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages of prehistory and the recent fossil-fuel–powered Anthropocene. Yet, as the biologist Roland Ennos argues, if you looked at people’s actual lives, you’d conclude that nearly the whole of human history deserves a different title: the Age of Wood.
“Who can tell of every use that wood has?” the theologian Martin Luther once asked. To chronicle them all, as Ennos aims to do, is to write a history of the world, because once you look for wood, you see it everywhere. It has been not only a ubiquitous presence but also a driving force, helping to explain the European colonization of the Americas or the rapid expansion of the United States. More to the point, in emphasizing how resolutely wooden the past has been, Ennos shows the deep continuities that connected Luther’s day to prehistoric times—and just how abrupt our recent ejection from the wooden age has been.
Ennos specializes in biomechanics and writes with an appreciative eye for wood’s physical qualities. Two stand out in his view, and both appear to be evolutionary accidents, in that they confer no obvious advantage on trees. First, when you break wood off a living tree and let it dry, it stiffens without losing strength or toughness. Very few materials share this property—bone, horn, and fingernail all weaken as they desiccate. The second “fortuitous” property of dead wood is that it’s flammable. These twin serendipities account for wood’s two great uses: You can build with it, and you can burn it.


newrepublic--2020-12-01--Welcome to the Pandemic Cliff

Welcome to the Pandemic Cliff

Members of Congress reconvened this week , facing a December 11 deadline to come up with a temporary spending bill to avoid a shutdown and increasingly dire pressure to pass some version of a stimulus package as the fates of millions of people hang in the balance .
The political debates we ’ ll be subject to over the next few weeks will sound familiar .
Since the first stimulus , the Republican-controlled Senate has thus far blocked Democratic-led efforts to pass a bill at the scale of the crisis , instead countering with smaller packages and liability giveaways for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debates that were had in August and the ones Congress is engaging in now is that there is no longer any time left to waste .
This is not hyperbole or fearmongering .
Without more aid , a vast swath of the country ’ s working class will be forced off several cliffs created by Congress and the White House .
As remaining federal relief programs are set to expire at the end of the year , we are now staring down an eviction crisis , a sick leave crisis , and an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is surging across the country .
A brief list of the stakes includes : emergency unemployment compensation , which gave people an additional 13 weeks of unemployment payments if they ’ d exhausted their state options ; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ’ s eviction moratorium , which helps protect tenants from being evicted for unpaid rent ; Economic Injury Disaster Loans , a program that provided low-interest loans to small business owners to help them weather the cost of closing up shop ( the Paycheck Protection Program , which paid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stopped accepting applications in August ) .
These are some of the programs keeping things together—barely .

The Families First paid sick leave ended up being a saving grace for many workers. Nicolas Ziebarth, an associate professor at Cornell University and co-author of a study on the efficacy of paid sick leave, estimated that with so many workers using the provision, it helped prevent roughly 15,000 new cases per day. Without an extension of the weekly unemployment payments and the paid sick leave policy, more workers will be once again faced with the decision between sudden financial ruin or their own health. In the middle of a pandemic, that choice can be deadly many times over.
The eviction moratorium enacted in September by the CDC is similarly set to expire come the end of the year, further complicating the messy jigsaw of state and local eviction moratoriums and threatening to put more people on the street in a pandemic winter. I say more people because evictions are already happening. Right before Thanksgiving, New York City marshals carried out their first evictions since the start of the pandemic. County courts like those in Jackson County, Missouri—home of Kansas City—have continued to pursue evictions. Tenant organizing has proliferated through the pandemic, but with the CDC order expiring on December 31, there’s little by way of legal federal protections to protect those at risk of losing their homes from landlords and overzealous judges. And without widespread rent relief, the looming threat of back rent will put tenants further at risk of losing their housing.
States and tribal nations are also in fiscal crisis, with staggering deficits caused by the pandemic, and federal funds that are either being held up in distribution or are off limits because of funding rules. There, too, another deadline looms: The Cares Act requires the funds be spent or returned by December 30. “The virus does not care if you are a Republican or Democrat,” Michael Leachman, vice president for state fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, recently told The Washington Post. “We already have another surge in cases, and what happens if after December 30 states and localities do not have the funding?”


newrepublic--2020-12-01--The Problem With Putting a BlackRock Alum in Charge of Greening the Economy

Usually , though , it ’ s up to governments to impose those constraints rather than leaving them up to corporate discretion .
In the United States and the EU , BlackRock ’ s apparent strategy has been to have as much of a voice as possible in that process and chip away at such constraints—in part by hiring government alums like Deese ( and , for that matter , Adewale Adeyemo , an Obama alum turned BlackRock senior adviser who the Biden team has announced will be the new deputy Treasury secretary ) .
That ’ s not to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door is either a hapless dupe or a moral monster .
But it seems unlikely that , in the aggregate , they would tend to rein in their former employer as aggressively as those who didn ’ t work there .
As David Dayen has pointed out , too , Deese was already a fan of loosening financial regulations before his time on Wall Street .
At the very least , connections between former work friends might give BlackRock a leg up in terms of information and access to a Biden administration , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ followed .
Corporate impunity and climate action historically don ’ t mix—even less so when it comes to one of the planet ’ s biggest fossil fuel investors ; there ’ s no reason to let the fox guard the henhouse .
And beyond his BlackRock ties , the fundamental issue is that Deese has consistently been a spokesman for “ all of the above ” approaches , whether or not he ’ s worked on Wall Street .
He ’ s yet to show any signs he wants to part with that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a stand-up guy makes up for the inherent dubiousness of his appointment fail to appreciate the stakes of this moment and this position : “ All of the above ” is a logical stance for a Wall Street executive eager to protect profits sourced to polluters , and an indefensible one for an administration that claims to be committed to tackling the climate crisis .
The 2019 U.N. Production Gap Report found that countries plan to produce 50 percent more coal , oil , and gas than is consistent with capping warming at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) , and 120 percent more than is consistent with 1.5 degrees Celsius .
Currently , the U.S. spends tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing fossil fuels , and it expended ample diplomatic resources during the Obama administration boosting gas development abroad .
If he ’ s confirmed , a major part of Deese ’ s job will be navigating the country out of a recession that , so far , the U.S. has responded to ( in part ) by pouring billions of dollars into propping up fossil fuel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As researchers with the Roosevelt Institute and elsewhere have argued , there ’ s no such thing as a “ climate-neutral ” stimulus .
Using fiscal policy to simply provide “ more choices and more options ” —the strategy Deese has vocally supported for at least a decade—won ’ t scale back fossil fuel production at the necessary rate if all the many other incentives spurring fossil fuel production remain in place , even if it does manage to produce a bunch of solar panels and electric cars .
His hawkish instincts on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help spurring on that clean energy revolution , either .

The Obama era should be a cautionary tale rather than a blueprint for policy and personnel.
That’s not to say everyone who goes through the revolving door is either a hapless dupe or a moral monster. But it seems unlikely that, in the aggregate, they would tend to rein in their former employer as aggressively as those who didn’t work there. As David Dayen has pointed out, too, Deese was already a fan of loosening financial regulations before his time on Wall Street. At the very least, connections between former work friends might give BlackRock a leg up in terms of information and access to a Biden administration, even if all appropriate protocols are technically followed. Corporate impunity and climate action historically don’t mix—even less so when it comes to one of the planet’s biggest fossil fuel investors; there’s no reason to let the fox guard the henhouse. And beyond his BlackRock ties, the fundamental issue is that Deese has consistently been a spokesman for “all of the above” approaches, whether or not he’s worked on Wall Street. He’s yet to show any signs he wants to part with that approach.
Those who think Deese being a stand-up guy makes up for the inherent dubiousness of his appointment fail to appreciate the stakes of this moment and this position: “All of the above” is a logical stance for a Wall Street executive eager to protect profits sourced to polluters, and an indefensible one for an administration that claims to be committed to tackling the climate crisis. The 2019 U.N. Production Gap Report found that countries plan to produce 50 percent more coal, oil, and gas than is consistent with capping warming at two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and 120 percent more than is consistent with 1.5 degrees Celsius. Currently, the U.S. spends tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing fossil fuels, and it expended ample diplomatic resources during the Obama administration boosting gas development abroad.
If he’s confirmed, a major part of Deese’s job will be navigating the country out of a recession that, so far, the U.S. has responded to (in part) by pouring billions of dollars into propping up fossil fuel, in line with other G20 countries. As researchers with the Roosevelt Institute and elsewhere have argued, there’s no such thing as a “climate-neutral” stimulus. Using fiscal policy to simply provide “more choices and more options”—the strategy Deese has vocally supported for at least a decade—won’t scale back fossil fuel production at the necessary rate if all the many other incentives spurring fossil fuel production remain in place, even if it does manage to produce a bunch of solar panels and electric cars. His hawkish instincts on deficit spending won’t be much help spurring on that clean energy revolution, either.


newrepublic--2020-12-01--Why Joe Biden Can
Stop Worrying and Start Spending Like Crazy

And that ’ s the magic of public money , the alchemy of public finance .
Because then even big , well-directed public investment is—by definition !
—not inflationary .
The new money , simply spent into existence by our money-issuing federal government , creates the very means of its own absorption .
This observation is the key to an economic recovery program that can be both ambitious and noninflationary—a program that will truly see the United States build back better .
These questions are hardly academic .
While Biden has several options for juicing the economy through executive action @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he will still have to deal with moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats in Congress if he wants to enact even a fraction of his agenda .
That will mean that he can ’ t cave to deficit hawks on the crucial question of whether a large deficit is bad for the economy .
Republicans themselves have all but admitted the specter of expansion-killing deficits is a fiction by passing a raft of tax cuts that did little but line the pockets of the wealthy and explode the very deficit they now seem so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wants to enact a successful recovery program , he will not just have to adopt the right policies but also change the way Washington thinks and talks about spending once and for all .
We all can agree that federal spending matters and that inflation can , in some circumstances , be dangerous .
This was the victory achieved by what ’ s known as the Great Moderation : 30 years of low consumer price index inflation in the aftermath of the stagflation of the 1970s .
What the Great Moderationists ignored , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hyperinflation in the form of asset price bubbles outside of the index raging throughout the Clinton era and beyond : first in the stock market , then in tech stock specifically , and finally in housing and housing-associated markets .
There could be no better example of capital misallocation , involving trillions of dollars thrown into mere speculation .
It is why the economist Robert Shiller dubbed it an era of “ irrational exuberance.
” Like all hyperinflations , the Clinton- and Bush-era asset price inflations were credit-fueled .
What Greenspan , then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Larry Summers , the Clinton Treasury secretary , should have done was to crowd out that merely speculative expenditure with productive investment ; or else rein it all in through taxation , interest rate hikes , and Treasury sales ; or pursue some combination of both .
All in the name of impounding that excess credit then flowing to speculative asset markets and redirecting it to actual productive investment : investment that fuels the production of real , not paper , wealth .

The Goldilocks balance is the state of affairs in which money supplies on the one hand, and goods supplies and productive capacity on the other hand, grow in tandem.
But the key to inflation, and to deflation, is the relation between promising and the capacity to fulfill promises. That’s how money works. Currency inflates when its supply grows faster than supplies of what it’s used to purchase—i.e., too much money chasing too few goods. It deflates when its supply grows more slowly than do supplies of what it’s used to purchase—too little money chasing too many goods. The Goldilocks balance is the state of affairs in which money supplies on the one hand, and goods supplies and productive capacity on the other hand, grow in tandem.
And that’s the magic of public money, the alchemy of public finance. Because then even big, well-directed public investment is—by definition!—not inflationary. The new money, simply spent into existence by our money-issuing federal government, creates the very means of its own absorption. This observation is the key to an economic recovery program that can be both ambitious and noninflationary—a program that will truly see the United States build back better.
These questions are hardly academic. While Biden has several options for juicing the economy through executive action (which we outline below), he will still have to deal with moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats in Congress if he wants to enact even a fraction of his agenda. That will mean that he can’t cave to deficit hawks on the crucial question of whether a large deficit is bad for the economy. Republicans themselves have all but admitted the specter of expansion-killing deficits is a fiction by passing a raft of tax cuts that did little but line the pockets of the wealthy and explode the very deficit they now seem so keen on bringing down. If Biden wants to enact a successful recovery program, he will not just have to adopt the right policies but also change the way Washington thinks and talks about spending once and for all.


newrepublic--2020-12-02--Who Gets to Recover From the Pandemic?

Who Gets to Recover From the Pandemic?

But the dip in municipal incomes didn ’ t have to be a long-term problem .
The federal government can run deficits that local governments can ’ t , and there was a moment in 2011 when the scale of the stimulus package was debated among technocrats in the Obama administration and things could have gone the other way .
But the Obama administration decided that a proposed $ 1.2 trillion package was too luxurious , so it , on the urging of Larry Summers , went with a package that was roughly half that amount .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this dismal decision and the resulting pain of the last 10 years , but The Wall Street Journal reported in May that state and local budgets had only recovered to their pre-recession levels last fall .
The government sent $ 275 billion to states and cities in 2009 , but the money was spent by 2012 .
The same article finds that evidence from the last recession suggests that every dollar states and cities are forced to cut will ultimately cost society between $ 1.50 to $ 2 .
The cuts are very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a department that has experienced decades of budget cuts , was a victim of city , state , and federal austerity in the wake of the recession , surely delaying the process of recovery after Hurricane Sandy as well as a whole host of other deferred maintenance .
Today , some estimate the city ’ s budgetary shortfalls for the next couple of years will reach $ 13.5 billion .
So in regards to Fauci ’ s hedge , the other question is , whose normal are we talking about ?
Because some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ businesses and high-net-worth individuals who have seen their financial lives improve this year , while the poorest people in society aren ’ t even close to fine .
As an International Monetary Fund study indicated this year , pandemics have a nasty tendency to widen wealth inequality , with the effects worsening five years afterward .
Already we ’ ve seen this trend—wages for high earners have rebounded , while low-wage workers are still struggling .
The average income for public housing residents in New York is just a little over $ 25,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Hurricane Sandy lasted only about 48 hours , and yet the residents of the Red Hook Houses are living with the fallout eight years on .
Once the surge of the pandemic has receded , how quickly can we make the most vulnerable in society whole ?
It might be longer than we think .
And is a return to 2019—when construction on the Red Hook Houses was just kicking into gear , when there were 34 million families below the poverty line—good enough ?
If normal was pre-pandemic levels of substandard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we might be back there soon enough .
However , if what we ’ re really asking is when we might live better—to have enough , where right now there is only scarcity—we have a long way to go .

And while the response to both crises are different, they both come down to questions of the scale and speed of public investment. The more money the city allocates to construction, the faster it goes. The amount the federal government invests in an economic recovery will surely determine the length of economic pain stemming from lockdowns. And we know this because the last financial catastrophe beginning in 2008 similarly eroded state and city budgets. Among other things, housing prices crashed and many workers were laid off, dramatically curtailing property and income taxes.
But the dip in municipal incomes didn’t have to be a long-term problem. The federal government can run deficits that local governments can’t, and there was a moment in 2011 when the scale of the stimulus package was debated among technocrats in the Obama administration and things could have gone the other way. But the Obama administration decided that a proposed $1.2 trillion package was too luxurious, so it, on the urging of Larry Summers, went with a package that was roughly half that amount. It’s hard to draw a straight line between this dismal decision and the resulting pain of the last 10 years, but The Wall Street Journal reported in May that state and local budgets had only recovered to their pre-recession levels last fall. The government sent $275 billion to states and cities in 2009, but the money was spent by 2012. The same article finds that evidence from the last recession suggests that every dollar states and cities are forced to cut will ultimately cost society between $1.50 to $2. The cuts are very literally not worth it.
NYCHA, a department that has experienced decades of budget cuts, was a victim of city, state, and federal austerity in the wake of the recession, surely delaying the process of recovery after Hurricane Sandy as well as a whole host of other deferred maintenance. Today, some estimate the city’s budgetary shortfalls for the next couple of years will reach $13.5 billion.


newrepublic--2020-12-02--The Global Temptation to Keep Building Pipelines

But recently the governing party ’ s environmental policies have encountered setbacks .
In mid-November , the German supreme court ruled that Merkel ’ s strategy to phase out of nuclear energy by 2022—a test case for phasing out coal plants as well—was unconstitutional .
The lawsuit was led by several companies that were part of the Nord Stream financing , arguing they were not adequately compensated for lost revenue .
And despite the government ’ s attempts to lead the country towards renewables , investments are still being made in new natural gas infrastructure .
The Nord Stream 1 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ energy project with the Russian state-owned company Gazprom and two major German companies , E.ON Ruhrgas and Wintershall .
Initial construction was completed in 2011 .
Since then , Scandanavian companies such as Alleseas and Orstead A/S have been involved in contracting and transportation , respectively .
Nord Stream 1 is currently the longest underwater gas pipeline .
In 2015 , stakeholders announced that it would expand the original gas pipeline which led to the formation of Nord Stream 2 .
So far , over ninety percent of the pipeline ( 2300 kilometers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Russia and the north coast of Germany .
As of November 2020 , the Nord Stream 2 , the pipeline has cost $ 11 billion , and if completed , it would operate for at least fifty years despite Germany ’ s goal of being climate neutral in 30 years .
It ’ s not clear that this pipeline meets any urgent demand : The German Ministry of Economic Affairs admitted in early November that German gas consumption has decreased over the last several years .
Numerous foreign governments , including the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have expressed concerns about any project that might tend to increase Germany ’ s reliance on Russia .
The project ’ s supporters , such as Federal Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz ( SPD ) , have countered that , given Germany ’ s low gas consumption , the pipeline would hardly make Germany dependent on Russia for energy .
They have also defended the pipeline as a private investment matter , or even a necessary bridge solution as Germany transitions off nuclear power , which is highly unpopular in the country @

But recently the governing party’s environmental policies have encountered setbacks. In mid-November, the German supreme court ruled that Merkel’s strategy to phase out nuclear energy by 2022—a test case for phasing out coal plants, as well—was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was led by several companies that were part of the Nord Stream financing, arguing they were not adequately compensated for lost revenue. And despite the government’s attempts to lead the country toward renewables, investments are still being made in new natural gas infrastructure.
The Nord Stream 1 pipeline began in 2005 as a multicountry energy project with the Russian state-owned company Gazprom and two major German companies, E.ON Ruhrgas and Wintershall. Initial construction was completed in 2011. Since then, Scandanavian companies such as Alleseas and Orstead A/S have been involved in contracting and transportation. Nord Stream 1 is currently the longest underwater gas pipeline. In 2015, stakeholders announced that it would expand the original gas pipeline, which led to the formation of Nord Stream 2. So far, over 90 percent of the pipeline—2,300 kilometers (1,429 miles)—has already been constructed between Narwa-Bucht, Russia, and the north coast of Germany. As of November 2020, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has cost $11 billion, and if completed, it will operate for at least 50 years, despite Germany’s goal of being climate-neutral in 30 years.
It’s not clear that this pipeline meets any urgent demand: The German Ministry of Economic Affairs admitted in early November that German gas consumption has decreased over the last several years. Numerous foreign governments, including those of the U.S. and several countries in Eastern Europe, have expressed concerns about any project that might tend to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia. The project’s supporters, such as Federal Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party, have countered that, given Germany’s low gas consumption, the pipeline would hardly make Germany dependent on Russia for energy. They have also defended the pipeline as a private investment matter or even a necessary bridge solution as Germany transitions from nuclear power, which is highly unpopular in the country.


newrepublic--2020-12-02--The Consultant-Class Feminism of Joe Biden’s Cabinet

To date , the Biden-Harris administration has named 17 women to top posts , some of them firsts , many of them contingent on Senate confirmation .
Heading in the direction of gender parity in hiring has been regarded as another “ audacious ” Biden move , a turning point in the country ’ s history .
The opening note of this administration is meant to portend a feminist future , even if it is headed by a white man in his seventies .
After a primary that raised hopes that “ America would end up with a revolutionary person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Monica Hesse wrote in The Washington Post , “ [ i ] nstead , we ’ ll end up with Joe Biden , ” but “ he still can be a revolutionary ” if his Cabinet consists of at least 50 percent women .
It ’ s not clear if the equality bar is set that low—a perfect half , nothing more—after the highs of the primary , or if it was always so slight .
If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table , these appointments may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in many ways symbolic gains , a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept .
Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “ they can do that , too ” —not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women ’ s lives .
It ’ s a regression to the kind of individualistic , girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to “ gender equality ” largely confined to who holds the power , not what they do with it .
We have yet to hear how , specifically , the first woman selected to head the Treasury Department or Defense would deliver something different than any or all of the men who preceded her .
And there is nothing new in the symbolic being elevated over the reality of the daily lives of the people these powerful appointees are meant to serve .

To date, the Biden-Harris administration has named 17 women to top posts, some of them firsts, many of them contingent on Senate confirmation. Heading in the direction of gender parity in hiring has been regarded as another “audacious” Biden move, a turning point in the country’s history. The opening note of this administration is meant to portend a feminist future, even if it is headed by a white man in his seventies. After a primary that raised hopes that “America would end up with a revolutionary person in the Oval Office,” columnist Monica Hesse wrote in The Washington Post, “[i]nstead, we’ll end up with Joe Biden,” but “he still can be a revolutionary” if his Cabinet consists of at least 50 percent women. It’s not clear if the equality bar is set that low—a perfect half, nothing more—after the highs of the primary, or if it was always so slight.
If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.


newrepublic--2020-12-02--American Military Supremacy is
Not Inevitable

The country with the most powerful military in the world likes to pretend it has no choice in the matter @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t maintain order , the story goes , disorder would prevail .
But @ @ @ @ @ drag on , this justification grows less and less plausible .
On Episode 21 of @ @ @ @ @ hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to the historian Stephen Wertheim about how the @ @ @ @ @ as a military superpower , and what might happen if we relinquished it .
Later @ @ @ @ @ staff writer Alex Shepherd analyzes the runoff elections in Georgia that will determine which party @ @ @ @ @ Kelly Loeffler , who ’ s favored to win , is a political newbie with @ @ @ @ @ her past .
Why don ’ t voters care ?

The country with the most powerful military in the world likes to pretend it has no choice in the matter. If the United States didn’t maintain order, the story goes, disorder would prevail. But as decades of messy wars drag on, this justification grows less and less plausible. On Episode 21 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to the historian Stephen Wertheim about how the U.S. took on its role as a military superpower, and what might happen if we relinquished it.
Later in the episode, TNR staff writer Alex Shepherd analyzes the runoff elections in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate. Republican Kelly Loeffler, who’s favored to win, is a political newbie with an insider trading scandal in her past. Why don’t voters care?
Read a transcript of Episode 21.