With its economic instability, mass immigration, corrupting influence of money on politics, and ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, our current era bears more than a slight resemblance to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dubbed by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. There are also striking differences. Back then, larger-than-life radical organizers—Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, and others—traversed the country, calling on the working class to rise up against its oppressors. Today’s critics of the capitalist order such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem tame by comparison.
Books
Homeless in Gaza
In Gaza more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, and it is among the young that the deepest despair often takes root. Some are turning to radical Islam, others to drugs. As many as eighty suicides are reported in Gaza each month, according to local aid groups, many among the young. Most of Gaza’s younger generation have nevertheless remained remarkably resilient, preparing against the odds for a better future, while also making an effort to learn about their past.
Will the Court Kill the Gerrymander?
The Wisconsin redistricting case before the Supreme Court, Gill v. Whitford, underscores how the justices’ failure to act on gerrymandering when they last had the chance, over a decade ago, has warped American electoral politics almost beyond recognition. It has allowed Republicans to turn the last three elections for Congress and many statehouses into a strange simulacrum of competition, in which the parties compete vigorously for votes even though GOP control has often been all but assured from the outset. At stake in Gill is the question of whether election outcomes can be made once again to provide at least a rough reflection of the popular will.
Trump to Undocumented Teens: Give Birth or Get Out
At the core of the anti-abortion movement is the tenet that a fetus is a person whose rights need to be protected. The Trump administration is taking this argument to an absurd and cruel extreme. A fetus in the United States requires the full protection and support of American law. As for its undocumented, adolescent mother—well, if she wants her rights, she should leave the country.
Memories of Mississippi
I had done it. Deep in the South I had reached one of the towns central to an uprising that would sweep away legal segregation, bring the vote to black people in the thirteen states that had made up the Confederacy, and overthrow the system of racial oppression called Jim Crow that had been re-imposed in those states after the Civil War. Over my shoulder was a Nikon F reflex. “You got a camera,” James Forman—then SNCC’s executive secretary—said to me when we met at the Freedom House. “Go into the courthouse. They got a big water cooler for whites and a little bitty bowel for negroes. Go take a picture of that.”
Art in a Time of Terror
For the most part, “Age of Terror: Art since 9/11” is sobering, serious stuff. Still, the British press does not seem have been especially impressed. More than one review has criticized the show and even its premise as trite or banal. Some have argued that art is simply unequal to the magnitude of the event. But isn’t that a given? Who can forget Karlheinz Stockhausen’s shocking observation, six days after the Twin Towers fell, that the attack was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”?
Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship
Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is less about two women and their stories than a trenchant dialogue about love and marriage by a writer who never hesitated to weave direct commentary and social argument into his story, contrasting these women not by their style or their voices, as Rousseau himself urged (and as a modern writer surely would), but by their clashing ideas.
Bitcoin Mania
The first time I bought virtual money, in October 2017, bitcoins, the cryptocurrency everyone by now has heard of, were trading at $5,919.20. A month later, as I started writing this, a single coin sold for $2,000 more. “Coin” is a metaphor. A cryptocurrency such as bitcoin is purely digital: it is a piece of code—a string of numbers and letters—that uses encryption techniques and a decentralized computer network to process transactions and generate new units. Its value derives entirely from people’s perception of what it is worth. The same might be said of paper money, now divorced from gold and silver, or of gold and silver for that matter. Money is a human invention. It has value because we say it does.
Is Trump Certifiable?
The irony of Trump now suggesting that his former chief strategist Steve Bannon “has lost his mind” is evident. But laudable as their call may be, psychiatrists can do little more than trumpet danger—unless Twenty-Fifth Amendment proceedings determining the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” are set in motion. At that point, the vice president or the Cabinet or Congress can call for a full mental health test and diagnostic assessment. But what will guard against the president’s excesses and remove him from office is more likely to be politics than the mind doctors.
‘The Biggest Taboo’: An Interview with Qiu Zhijie
Johnson: You don’t feel that things are harsher or tighter now?
Qiu: It’s like this: because the anticorruption crackdown was so harsh, officials don’t dare act or do anything. Everyone speaks in formulaic language, and reads the Party’s documents. That kind of atmosphere isn’t good. Actual measures are few, but you do feel a kind of authoritarianism that’s worse than before.
Sig Nordal 