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Tim Walz vs. JD Vance, plus Summer Beach Reading

On this episode of Start Making Sense, Katha Pollitt on JD Vance and John Powers on summer reading.

Jon Wiener

August 7, 2024

Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance of Ohio appear on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.(Win McNamee / Getty Images)

JD Vance’s remark about “childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable” continues to reverberate in the news. Katha Pollitt has our analysis, and rebuts Vance’s argument that people who don’t have children don’t have a stake in the country’s future.

Also: It’s August—and that means it’s time for summer beach reading. We asked John Powers, critic at large for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, for suggestions. His pick is Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, a 750-page novel about the rise of Mussolini.

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Defending the Undocumented, plus Uncovering Hidden Wealth | Start Making Sense
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of Start Making Sense: Trump’s ‘dictatorship on day one’ will feature executive orders to deport undocumented residents. Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law & Policy at UCLA Law School, will explain the legal strategy to be deployed by the sanctuary states and cities,

Also: Not everything is about Donald Trump. The Geneva Freeport, for example – where it doesn’t matter who is president of the US. The Freeport is a place where the world’s richest people hide art, jewelry, and other wealth from tax officials, creditors, and sometimes spouses. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has our analysis–her new book is “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.”

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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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