No Magazine Is an Island
This is less a letter to the editor and more a note of concern about the decline of international news in The Nation. In the March 5 issue, there were precisely zero articles or columns on foreign affairs, unless you count the review by Stuart Klawans of several foreign films. I guess the age of foreign correspondents is long gone when magazines are so financially strapped.
The issue was still full of good content, but The Nation is increasingly turning away from the rest of the world.
Never Mind Armageddon
Re “How to Get to a Fossil-Free USA,” by Bill McKibben [March 5]: Wind and solar power are not robust sources of baseload energy; nationally, they supply less than 8 percent of our demand. Across the country, about 65 percent of our electrical grid is fueled by natural gas and coal.
The best way the world can reduce its carbon footprint is to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. There is no practical way to reduce or capture the CO2 generated by burning coal and natural gas, and the problems with nuclear power are solvable. Dr. James Hansen, the retired NASA scientist who first alerted us to the danger of global warming caused by greenhouse gases, believes that the solution is to power the grid with nuclear energy. McKibben has done a great job of highlighting the problem with fossil fuels, but his solutions are inadequate and unrealistic.
Jim Padden bradenton, fla.
Executive Dysfunction
Re Karen J. Greenberg’s review of Jeremi Suri’s The Impossible Presidency [“Policy Overload,” March 5]: To me, the system of checks and balances envisioned by the founding fathers assumes that each branch of government will continually vie for power and be checked by the other two. While I agree that our system has become ever more top-heavy, this has been exacerbated by a Congress that is all too happy to abdicate its powers, causing the president to step in with executive orders, as Obama did with DACA, net neutrality, and parts of the Affordable Care Act, to name a few. Those who were all too happy to see Obama take such measures now see the folly of such a system, when the next president simply rolls it all back and issues new orders of his own.
Given the amount of attention that has been lavished, until recently, on presidential elections at the expense of all others, I wonder if this isn’t how most Americans think it should work.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is possible only with your support.
This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
Nannette Croce
Behold the Nothing That Is…
Re Stuart Klawans’s review of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames [March 5]: The inadvertent transposition of the words “a” and “cold” in line four of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” effects its own strange trick of perspective, reducing the already vestigial consciousness in the poem to mere duration, unlikely to personify anything. Or could this have been deliberate? Is Klawans making a graphematic incursion into Stevens’s poem, analogous to Kiarostami’s animated manipulation of Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow? Eileen M. Brennan augusta, w.va.
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