The white-knuckle ride that was 2017 has finally come to an end. From environmental disasters to NFL protests to a national reckoning on sexual harassment: this has been a tumultuous year. And that is not even mentioning the most riotous story of all: national politics. Below are some of my favorite op-eds and essays over the past year. I hope they capture some of the many conversations that have defined the past 12 months.
I didn’t understand how widespread rape was. Then the penny dropped
When our culture experiences a profound shift, we see the world in a new light. The #MeToo movement has illuminated and enlarged perspectives for countless people across the globe. In this moving personal essay, David Graeber shares how the Harvey Weinstein story caused him to reflect on his mother’s life story – and why it took the turn it did.
“As a child it never occurred to me to ask why she never continued in the theatre, even though she followed it avidly, or went back to college, even though she filled the house with books, or pursued her own career.
When I later asked she’d just say, “I lacked self-confidence.” But once I remember the phrase “casting couch” came up and I asked her if such things had existed in her day. She threw her eyes up and said, “Well, why do you think I never pursued a career in show business? Some of us were willing to sleep with producers. I wasn’t.”
This is why I’d like to get my thumbs on the throat of Harvey Weinstein. It’s not just that creeps like him drove my mother off the stage. It’s that in the process, they broke something. I don’t know what actually happened, or if any one specific thing even did happen; but the result was to leave her convinced she was unworthy; intellectually superficial; not genuinely talented; a lightweight; a fraud.”
Liberal elite, it’s time to strike a deal with the working class
How do we move forward from the political shock of the 2016 elections? In this essay Joan Williams mapped out a strategy for how to unite a willing coalition of disparate groups under the Democratic party umbrella. Yes, it involves compromise – and rejecting purity politics. Is that the wrong approach? You decide.
Democrats need to thread a necklace that includes four overlapping groups: the liberal-to-moderate college-educated elite, the white working class, communities of color, and the progressives and millennials who flocked to Bernie Sanders. Good jobs hold deep appeal for both communities of color and the white working class. College-educated liberals and moderates will vote Democratic regardless.
Sorely needed is something concrete to inspire the millennials who flocked to Sanders. I support single-payer health insurance but that’s counterproductive as a campaign issue: it just sets us up for defeat again as Big Government Liberals. Why not focus on college debt relief?
That’s the maw millennials see gobbling up their future, and the current trajectory of college debt is unsustainable anyway. We don’t need to design a program: people don’t vote on policy details. People vote because, as Kamala Harris once pointed out, you’ve connected with what keeps them up at night. Economic issues do that.
We can’t hear Colin Kaepernick any more. He’s being drowned out by noise
Few figures have been as polarizing in America this year as Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL protest beamed race politics into the living rooms of sports fans across the country. And few have followed Kaepernick’s struggles more closely than the Berkeley academic and commentator Ameer Hasan Loggins. In this superb piece, he touches on the contradiction at the heart of Kaepernick’s presence in the United States. That he is at once everywhere – and yet so rarely truly heard and understood.
Colin Kaepernick is everywhere. Like an icon, he is freeze-framed stoically kneeling for everyone to see. We see his image on stickers, T-shirts, graffiti and posters. It’s on magazine covers, television shows and social media sites. Oddly, the more we see Kaepernick’s likeness, the less we hear his message.
Colin Kaepernick first kneeled during a pre-game national anthem in 2016. His reasoning was simple: “[I’m] not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”
To Kaepernick his protest was: “Bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
That is what Kaepernick wants to talk about. Instead, his message is being slowly erased. Some want to make Kaepernick’s protest all about Trump. Others want to ignore what he is saying completely and shift the conversation to patriotism, the military and respect for the flag.
A chronicle of fear: seven days as a Muslim immigrant in America
We all remember the gut-wrenching weekend when the first iteration of the Muslim ban went into effect. People flooded airports in protest. Lives hung suspended in the air. But what was it like – on a visceral level – to be a Muslim immigrant in America at that time? My colleague Mona Chalabi wrote a deeply personal account of a week in her life as the Muslim ban loomed darkly overhead.
My phone feels like a bomb – constant dings let me know each new horrifying headline. The executive order includes green card holders. And even British nationals who have passports from the countries affected. People are being detained at airports. Being put in handcuffs. Having their electronic devices searched because they were born in the wrong place.
I get a text from my friend C. It says “2017 is shit”, another message immediately appears: “I had the worst date last night.”
I contemplate deleting all my tweets that mention Trump. I look through my history to see if I’ve said anything negative. It doesn’t look great. Someone in immigration control might decide that 140 characters mean I can’t come home to sleep in my bed.
Don’t blame the opioid crisis on addicts. Here are the real culprits
The American opioid crisis has claimed more lives than the Vietnam war. It has torn through communities leaving unimaginable destruction in its wake. Just who is to blame? My colleague Chris McGreal, who has been reporting on the crisis over countless months, makes clear: it’s not addicts.
This is an almost uniquely American crisis driven in good part by particular American issues from the influence of drug companies over medical policy to a “pill for every ill” culture. Trump’s commission, which called the opioid epidemic “unparalleled”, said the grim reality is that “the amount of opioids prescribed in the US was enough for every American to be medicated around the clock for three weeks”.
The US consumes more than 80% of the global opioid pill production even though it has less than 5% of the world’s population. Over the past 20 years, one federal institution after another lined up behind the drug manufacturers’ false claims of an epidemic of untreated pain in the US. They seem not to have asked why no other country was apparently suffering from such an epidemic or plying opioids to its patients at every opportunity.
With the pharmaceutical lobby’s money keeping Congress on its side, regulations were rewritten to permit physicians to prescribe as many pills as they wanted without censure. Indeed, doctors sometimes found themselves hauled before ethics boards for not supplying enough.
Living in cars, working for Amazon: meet America’s new nomads
Inequality rarely makes front page news. But it is a condition which is contributing to some of the most profound political, social and cultural stories of our times. Jessica Bruder, the author of Nomadland, has reported on one such story: the rise of nomads, who have taken to living in vehicles in order to survive in the harsh realities of 21st-century America. In this excerpt of her book, the dystopian nature of this life is on full display.
Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, through exhaustion and sometimes tears.
Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills. Minus credit card debt. Minus utility fees. Minus student loan and car payments. Minus the biggest expense of all: rent.
In the widening gap between credits and debits hangs a question: which bits of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living?
Design by Sam Morris and Francisco Navas
