Search Results for: The Nation

Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination

Longreads Pick

“The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of court and other public records involving workers who said they had suffered miscarriages, gone into premature labor or, in one case, had a stillborn baby after their employers rejected their pleas for assistance.”

Published: Oct 21, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,111 words)

Checkpoint Nation

Longreads Pick

ICE is bad, but as that agency gets the bulk of critics’ ire, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency legally operates within 100 miles of the border, where it needs neither warrents nor explanations to search and detain American citizens. Civil liberties are in danger. How did this happen?

Source: Texas Observer
Published: Oct 8, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,074 words)

Gary Keith and Ron, the Magi of Mets Nation

Longreads Pick

Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling — the broadcast trio for “baseball’s unwanted stepchildren,” the Mets — salvage yet another hopeless season in the booth by improvising around the part where “the Mets haven’t played a meaningful game in months.”

Published: Sep 25, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,759 words)

There’s No Discrimination in Baseball!

Moodboard / Getty

Historically girls have been excluded from baseball and pushed into softball. The organization Baseball for All seeks to change that, empowering girls to stay in the game. At Lenny Letter, Britni de la Cretaz catches the organization’s annual tournament in Rockford, Illinois (home of the inspiration team for A League of Their Own). Almost 300 badass girls from around the world take to the diamond, cultivating confidence and sisterhood.

The league was the first and only women’s professional-baseball league in U.S. history; it existed from 1943 to 1954. The [Baseball for All] tournament is this generation’s chance to make women’s-baseball history of their own.

It’s not that most girls grow up preferring softball, or that the development of girls’ softball sprung up because American girls decided they liked it better. The exclusion of girls from baseball in the United States was deliberate and systematic.

Often, when girls go to try out for their school teams, many of them are told they can’t play baseball if their school also has a softball team, citing Title IX’s “separate but equal” clause: if there is a comparable women’s team, a girl cannot play on the boys’ team.

Ella Comfort-Cohen, thirteen, wants people to “get logical: I’m a person who plays baseball, it doesn’t matter if I’m a girl or a boy!” Katrina is even more blunt about it: “One day it won’t be interesting anymore that I’m a girl playing baseball.”

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Is The Scripps National Spelling Bee Evil?

Longreads Pick

Back in 2013, for Deadspin, Drew Magary attended the annual Scripps Spelling Bee, in which 11 million kids spell off across America in a bid to become the brainy few who land onstage for the final round, and learns how such a simple contest has been sullied by the need to keep the event exciting for ESPN’s television audience.

Source: Deadspin
Published: May 31, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,723 words)

The ‘Treasonous’ Teens Living in One Nation Under Guns

A prayer vigil for the victims of Marshall County High School. (Alan Warren/The Messenger-Inquirer via AP)

Teens seem somehow wired for disagreement in their adolescent years. Sometimes this is simply a product of exercising one’s personhood, other times it seems connected to a sort of magic of youth that lies, in part, in their relative newness to the culture. They are old enough to know how to communicate and observe and think critically, but young enough to question the status quo.

This is evidenced beautifully in a recent Washington Post profile by Eli Saslow of Wyoming teen Moriah Engdahl, who seeks out every possible way to be the opposite of her father, Alan. Moriah is a student journalist, her father is a media-hating Trump supporter; she supports gay rights, he thinks “that stuff is better off staying hidden.” Moriah is the youngest and most headstrong of  Alan’s four daughters, and he calls her “the mouthy, hard-headed one” with pride, even though they butt heads— most recently over the issue of gun regulations.

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Trump’s Wall Would Devastate Big Bend National Park

AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

The lower Rio Grande forms the border between Texas and Mexico. Although it’s the fourth-longest river in the U.S. and feeds wildly diverse ecosystems along its 2000-mile course, the Rio Grande is treated like an irrigation ditch and what writer Nick Paumgarten calls a “moat” dividing the two nations. Trump’s proposed border wall would follow a large portion of it, devastating its fragile ecology without slowing the trafficking of hard drugs.

For The New Yorker, Paumgarten floated the rugged river canyons through Big Bend National Park. Camping on both sides of the border, his flotilla included such esteemed companions as Democratic Senator Tom Udall, from an influential conservation-minded family, and Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson.You have to see certain places to understand why they must be protected. Paumgarten’s story lets readers experience this landscape themselves, to appreciate what Trump’s wall would destroy: not only the landscape, but the opportunity to experience tranquility around campfires, for wildlife encounters, starlit nights and spiritual experiences, and the chance for future generations to connect with nature.

Having been determined by the 1848 peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, the border traces the river’s deepest channel—the thalweg—which, because the riverbed frequently shifts according to the water’s whims, is in some respects notional. Of course, no one is proposing that a wall be built in the middle of the river, or for that matter on Mexican soil, even if Mexico is going to pay for it. So the wall would go on the American side, some distance from its banks—miles into U.S. territory, at times. It would cut people off from their own property and wildlife from the main (and sometimes the only) water source in a vast upland desert. The Center for Biological Diversity has determined that ninety-three listed or proposed endangered species would be adversely affected. The wall could disrupt the flow of what meagre water there is, upon which an ecosystem precariously depends. And it would essentially seal the United States off from the river and cede it to Mexico: lopping off our nose to spite their face. It would shrink the size of Texas.

There is also the matter of efficacy. The wall would probably delay a hypothetical crossing by a few minutes, depending on its design and the manner of the breach. There are videos of Mexicans deploying ladders, ramps, ropes, welding torches, and tunnels to get over, through, or under border fences. (There are about seven hundred miles of fence already, most of it in California and Arizona.) For a great deal of its length, the river is insulated on both sides by hundreds of miles of desert—inhospitable terrain that does more to discourage smugglers and migrants than a wall ever could. (The vast majority of hard drugs intercepted on the southern border is coming through so-called points of entry—the more than forty official crossings—hidden in vehicles and cargo.) And, while the banks of the river, for much of it, are free of impediments, except for thick stands of invasive cane and salt cedar, which can make life miserable for the Border Patrol, about a hundred miles of it cut through deep canyons far more imposing and prohibitive to a traveller on foot than a slab of concrete or steel. The canyons don’t require funding from Congress.

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England’s National Health Service Is Suffering Growing Pains

Peter Byrne/PA Wire URN:34998098

As T.S. Eliot said, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” Recently, much whimpering has come from the thousands of infirm people waiting in England’s overcrowded, understaffed hospitals. The sick lay on stretchers in hallways for entire days, or on the floor. Some wait for hours in the ambulances that brought them to the hospital.

For the London Review of Books, James Meek examines the crisis that has struck England’s National Health Service. Preparing for a surge of aging citizens with various ailments and a dependence on caretakers, NHS initiated a transition from an old hospital-based system to a new ambitious system centered around home health care. Unfortunately, the transition has not been smooth, and the future looks uncertain. The reform also has people asking what kind of country they want England to be: one of solidarity and publicly funded health care, or one of privately funded care where, like the United States, everyone fends for themselves.

A whistleblower told the Health Service Journal that ambulance delays in the east of England had led to the deaths of at least 19 patients and serious harm to 21 more. On 1 January, an 81-year-old woman in Clacton, Essex, dialed 999, complaining of chest pains. The ambulance took three hours and 45 minutes to arrive. It was too late. A few days later, a 52-year-old man in Norfolk collapsed with severe chest pain and vomiting. He was taken to the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital, but had to wait in the back of the ambulance that took him there for four and a half hours before being seen by a doctor inside the building. He was told to go home and collapsed again when he got there. Two ambulances sent to get him were diverted to other calls and by the time he returned to hospital, his life couldn’t be saved.

One doctor in a major A&E department in the east of England told me he’d witnessed short cuts taken by staff under pressure. For a time, ambulance crews had been allowed to leave patients in a hospital area that wasn’t technically A&E reception. One elderly patient with abdominal pain was diverted within the hospital from emergency medicine to a GP-style consultation, sent home, returned to the hospital a few hours later, and died. “What I’ve seen is the relentlessness of the shifts,” the doctor said. “The intensity. The feeling of higher and higher accountability. And then a lack of investment in staff. Asking them to do more and more and more, to cover more and more patients. There’s no give and take. The staff they should be investing in get more and more demoralized. You’re at risk of creating a Mid-Staffs environment where people don’t really know who they’re working for and start accepting risk that previously would have been deemed unacceptable. They stop reporting things because they reported them before and nothing happened. It’s creating a dangerous culture.” What should be done? “Stop decreasing capacity. Build capacity and build staffing. The party line is always ‘it doesn’t affect patient care.’ Of course it fucking does.”

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Welcome to the New Transnational Paradigm

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File

Trump’s ascent to power, Russia’s militant land grab, Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing, Germany’s rising neo-fascism, lawlessness in Rwanda, North Korea’s nuclear threats ─ these countries appear to have gone crazy. Or has the whole world started unraveling? At The Guardian, Rana Dasgupta examines the connections between these seemingly separate issues, showing that events people might have previously blamed as problems of their particular history and particular institutions no longer reflect such provinciality.

What Dasgupta sees is the lessening influence of individual nations as the state of the world erodes local sovereignty for a larger, more interconnected system of politics and economics. The refugee crisis and off-shore banking are two symptoms of the erosion of national influence. Nationalism is one response to it. Build a border wall, leave the EU, threaten minority groups. But none of these measures will protect people from the new transnational paradigm.

The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.

Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonized world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorized and despoiled.

The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.

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