On this episode of Start Making Sense, Katha Pollitt on JD Vance and John Powers on summer reading.
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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A lot of people who voted for abortion rights referenda this year also voted for Trump. What were they thinking? How do they understand politics? Amy Littlefield spent election day in Amarillo, Texas, trying to find out.
Also: John Lewis, who died in 2020, challenged injustice from the sit-ins of 1960 to the Age of Trump. Historian David Greenberg talks about what we can learn from his example. Greenberg’s new book is “John Lewis: A Life.”
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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.