The United States is on track to have the hottest summer on record, ever. But around the world, particularly in the Global South, people have already suffered the unbearable consequences this year. This May, a 127 degree heatwave hit New Delhi, and heat index temperatures rose to 125 degrees in Manila and Bangkok in the spring. And in the past year, 3.8 billion people suffered dangerous heat. The percentage of heat-related death is expected to climb to 370 percent in the next 25 years.
Air conditioning has become the most convenient and yet short sighted solution to surviving global warming, especially in the West. But exactly what role has it played in exacerbating it? In the US, air conditioning allowed for the deindustrialization of Northern cities and rapid suburban sprawl, car culture, enclosed shopping malls, and more. Greenhouse gas emissions from air conditioning are expected to double in the next 25 years.
What are the solutions, as the rest of the world suffers inequitably as a result? Scientist Stan Cox argues that we need policy to be centered around “climate mitigation, adaptation, and justice.” But there’s a problem. “The utter failure so far to mitigate has created a much greater need for the other two legs: adaptation to a rapidly heating earth and restorative justice for those being hit hardest by climate change,” writes Cox.
Read the rest of Cox’s editorial through the link in bio.
📸: Peter Pereira / Standard Times via AP Photo
There’s one version of 2025 in which the Department of Homeland Security will be “even more draconian than its previous incarnation” in immigration enforcement, argues writer Gaby Del Valle.
In a 34-page chapter from Project 2025, Ken Cuccinelli—the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under Trump—outlines a plan to expand deportation, eliminate asylum protections and temporary protected status for millions, rescind legal requirements around detaining conditions for unaccompanied minors, and much more.
In fact, the DHS as we know it would be dismantled entirely, in favor of a “stand-alone border and immigration agency,” pledges Cuccinelli. This new iteration would be stripped of oversight. Through executive authority, ICE would be able to conduct “expedited removal,” ensuring fast-track deportation not just in the 100 miles around the border (as it is currently allowed to do), but nationwide. Visa categories, including for the T and U visas that are given to victims of trafficking and other crimes who aid in police investigation of said crimes, would be reduced or eliminated entirely. Cuccinelli even pledges to introduce a bill that would allocate funding for ICE agents to arrest more immigrants and for anti-immigration attorneys who argue for deportation.
“During Trump’s first term, many of his policies were scrapped not because of their discriminatory intent or horrific outcomes, but because they violated the APA,” or Administrative Procedure Act, writes Del Valle. “With four years to prepare, however—and a federal judiciary stacked in Trump’s favor—it looks like a second Trump term wouldn’t succumb to such pitfalls again.”
For more of a thorough analysis of Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda, click the link in bio.
Illustration by Ellen Weinstein (@ellenweinsteinilloz )
Is Anne Carson the Rupi Kaur of Classics?
Writer Emily Wilson, in her review of Carson’s latest work “Wrong Norma,” argues that while Carson and Kaur are indeed very different kinds of writers, they follow a similar formula. “Be Canadian. Be zany. Be moody. Be relatable. Write about your mother. Write about desire. Write about trauma. Write about loneliness. Write about grief. Write about nature. Write about the body. Invoke universals. Make it mythic,” writes Wilson. What distinguishes Carson from her more pop-inclined compatriots is her clear interest in disguise, performance, and experimentation with genre—which she revisits in “Wrong Norma.” It “explores what, if anything, links one thing to another.”
But where Carson struggles is in her longer pieces, which lack the sharp punch of Carson’s signature single-paragraph form. “Like many of us, Carson uses writing to find out what she thinks; but the means of production do not always need to be preserved in the finished product. You can throw the ladder away after you make the climb.”
As a critic, Wilson posits a central question around the enigmatic Carson: Where does the myth of Carson begin and where does it end? “I have been told that Carson, preparing to give a talk onstage, has been spotted in the green room, speaking to herself and saying over and over, ‘I am Anne Carson. I am Anne Carson,” writes Wilson. “The performance of her own personal identity, on the page as well as onstage, is a site of struggle and artistry.”
Check out the rest of Wilson’s review of Carson’s “Wrong Norma” through the link in bio. Art by @lilyqian_
If Trump wins another term, will the Department of Health and Human Services become the “Department of Life” once again?
Under Project 2025, the FDA would rescind medication abortion, using the Comstack Act to prosecute anyone who sends abortion medication by mail. The HHS would restrict birth control and abortion access entirely, even cutting funds provided for those traveling for out-of-state abortion. HHS could prohibit Title X funding for facilities that provide condoms, eliminate Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, and alternatively, create a “pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children,” pledges Roger Severino, Christian Right attorney and former head of the HHS’s Office of Civil Rights.
Nearly every agency of the HHS would “be retooled with the goal of promoting heterosexual marriage and procreation,” writes national affairs correspondent Joan Walsh. Antidiscrimination policy statements identifying sex with sexual orientation and gender identity will be repealed.
“This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity,” writes Walsh.
Read the rest of what Trump has in mind for the HHS at the link in our bio.
Our June issue, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, is here, starring a series of features on Project 2025 by Kim Phillips-Fein, Chris Lehmann, Gaby Del Valle, as well as essays by Emily Wilson, Karrie Jacobs, and Ken Chen. Head to the link in our bio to subscribe and start reading the issue in full.
When the artist Keith Haring arrived in New York in 1978, he set forth on a creative peripatetic life. The day he landed in the city as a scholarship student at the School of Visual Arts, Haring rented a $40 room at the YMCA. Within days, he found an apartment through a man he met at the Christopher Street piers. Ultimately, a young Haring immersed himself in the world of “Manic Panic hair dye, the B-52’s, and cheap Polish food” within the East Village scene, where he scrawled his now world-famous graffiti on subway cars.
Brad Gooch’s new biography of the artist, “Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring,” chronicles the life of the legendary downtown artist, but also adds a vital chapter to New York’s late twentieth-century cultural history. “Radiant” “helps fill in the crater that is the untold story of the queer art movement after Andy Warhol and before Rent,” writes critic Sarah Schulman.
Haring flourished amongst his peers through video, performance and installation works, at a time when the New York art scene was largely free from the pressures of self-commodification, and more experimental. “Because there was a collective process of discovery taking place, everything was interdisciplinary, and most people—even the nerdiest writers like myself—ended up on a stage performing something. Improv was a way of life, and collaboration its only means,” writes Schulman of this nostalgic era.
Read the rest of her essay from our May issue at the link in our bio.
📸: Paulo Fridman / Getty Images
Overdose prevention centers are known by many names—safe injection sites, safe injection facilities, safe consumption sites, and more. They’re places where drug users can test and use their supply under the careful medical supervision of trained professionals. There are 200 OPCs in over 14 countries, and they’ve been in operation for almost 40 years. No one has died at an OPC.
Within New York state, the organization OnPoint runs the nation’s only two OPCs in New York City, and they’ve reversed over one thousand overdoses. But advocates, lawmakers and families argue that only two sites are not enough to mitigate the overdose death rates across the state.
“If my son had a safe place to use, he might not have died alone in a bathroom!” said Alexis Pleus, founder of Truth Pharm, a harm reduction group based in Binghamton, at a rally in Albany back in March.
Advocates have said that if Governor Kathy Hochul authorized and expanded OPCs, Hochul could allocate money from the $2.6 billion settlements given to the state by opioid manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to fund them. OPCs across the state would dramatically reduce overdose deaths and save up to $7 million a year in healthcare costs in New York City alone.
Aside from the fight for authorization happening on the federal, state and local levels, the biggest hurdle seems to be stigma and perception of how these spaces function. When people visit OPCs, they’re often surprised by how normal they seem. “Visitors’ surprise raises a question underlying so much of this crisis: How do you expect a drug user to look?” writes reporter Adam Smith-Perez.
To read the rest of this editorial, follow the link in bio.
📸: Sarah Duggan / Drug Policy Alliance
The #ChineseDemocracyMovement is grappling with a generational rift as young #feminists , shaped by the #MeToo era, call for a reckoning over sexual harassment allegations against prominent older activists.
Our latest feature from Rong Xiaoqing delves into the tensions that have emerged as a new generation of activists, focused on consent culture, #BLM , and LGBTQ+ rights, push for a decentralized, issue-focused approach to activism.
Some elders have dismissed their efforts as attention-seeking, but experts suggest the disconnect stems in part from the CCP's erasure of protest history, making it difficult for different generations to build connections.
Despite the divide, some on both sides are seeking to bridge the gap and push the movement forward.
🔗: Swipe through to learn more and head to the link in our bio to read the full story. The piece also appears in @nationmag .
#Tiananmen#HumanRights#CivilRights#WomensRights#China#Activism#SocialJustice
In late April of 1968, shortly after the NYPD violently cleared protestors at Columbia University, New York Magazine assigned artist Burton Silverman to illustrate what remained of the scene. Only a few weeks before, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated, “heightening the political tensions and leading to a much more charged atmosphere,” Silverman recalls.
He captured the Columbia protests through a variety of fraught scenes and occasional character studies: mounted police officers ready to attack “like giant sentinels,” graduates defiant and marching through campus with flags and open gowns, Puerto Rican independence activists, and the often-marginalized female protesters, relegated to caretaking yet still marching along with their infant children in tow.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) controlled three buildings, where much of the police violence occurred. Hamilton Hall was occupied by Black students, who protested a new gymnasium’s construction which would’ve required athletes to enter through a separate entrance on the Harlem side of campus. Protesters coined the separate-but-equal entrance and its project “Gym Crow.”
The Nation was lucky enough to publish Silverman’s eerily prescient illustrations via @oppart . To read more of a behind the scenes account, follow the link in bio. Illustrations by @alternatebubble .
On October 7, Manee Jirachat, a Thai laborer who lived at Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel, was taken hostage by Hamas.
Manee came to Israel from Thailand’s rural Isaan region, where poverty is almost double the Thai national average. For over three decades, Israel has been exporting cheap, largely agricultural laborers from Thailand to replace Palestinian labor. The fate of Thai workers “has been largely overlooked by Israeli and Western media during the past six months, rendering them as invisible now as they were when they were working in Israel,” writes reporter Timothy McLaughlin.
Thai laborers in Israel often face “punishing” conditions on settlements. According to a 2015 Human Rights Watch report, several laborers said they were illegally “forced to work long hours,” and “live in squalid conditions.” On one farm, workers were forced to sleep in cardboard boxes. Five years later, a report found that 83 percent of migrant workers were paid less than minimum wage. Matan Kaminer, an anthropologist, has argued that importing low-wage workers is part of Israel’s long-term plan “to basically wean the Israeli economy off its dependence on Palestinian labor,” and separate Israelis and Palestinians from “one another, including all the economic interconnections.”
Israel's leaders made no secret of this. Two years after sealing Gaza and the West Bank and restricting movement for millions of Palestinians in 1993, Thai workers were brought in by the thousands, followed by Romanians, Turkish and Filipino laborers in various sectors. Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told a crowd at a fundraising event that within four months “there would be no need for any Palestinian workers at all” and that “the ultimate goal” was “separation between a Jewish state and the Palestinian entity.” This goal has never fully come to fruition, though 20,000 workers in Gaza have lost their jobs since October, and some 160,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank "have lost or are at risk of losing their employment."
As Israel continues to expand its settlements, it must reckon with who—whether migrant laborer or Palestinian landowner—is rendered invisible?
Our May issue is here! Featuring Amy Littlefield on underground abortions, Timothy McLaughin on the hidden lives of Israel’s Thai workforce, Sarah Schulman on a new biography of Keith Haring, and so much more.
Head to our link in bio to read the issue in full.
G. Paul Blundell works at an Amazon delivery station outside of Philadelphia. Every day for four months, managers assigned him the task of stowing—one of the most strenuous tasks—because “rate tracking” showed he was fast at it. Blundell soon sustained a rotator cuff injury in both shoulders, and couldn’t even raise his arms because of the sharp pain.
Amazon workers like Blundell are now organizing for better working conditions and to “win dignity and control on the shop floor,” writes reporter Ella Fanger.
“Management had made it our problem before—their unsafe behavior,” said Blundell. “By organizing each other, we were able to make their unsafe behavior their problem.”
Amazon has the highest injury rate in the warehousing industry, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and over a dozen other workers’ rights groups, based on recently released data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Amazon’s rate is almost triple the injury rate of Walmart, the next largest warehouse employer in the US.
Amazon claims that its injury rates are comparable to the average rate of warehouses with more than 1,000 employees. But Amazon employs 79 percent of all workers in this sector, meaning their own numbers have a disproportionate effect on that average.
Recently, Amazon announced that its Prime Delivery set records for speed in the first three months of 2024. Workers, advocates and lawmakers are fighting the company’s practices that have enabled this milestone: such as “time off task,” which measures the time between workers’ scans of items and the use of quotas to fire “underperforming” employees, in some cases without supervisor approval. At one Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, Amazon fired hundreds of workers who failed to meet productivity quotas between August 2017 and September 2018.
Last week, Senator Ed Markey and Teamsters President Sean O’ Brien announced the introduction of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which would ban “time off task,” and increase transparency around productivity quotas.
Read the rest of the story through our link in bio.
📷: Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
