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Feature
Testimonials to ‘The Nation’
Encomiums from Elizabeth Warren, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and many more.
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Young ‘Nation’ Writers On Creating Our Radical Future
As The Nation looks forward to the next 150 years, we asked some contributors to StudentNation, the campus-oriented section of our site, and former Nation interns what a radical future looks like to them.
The Nation
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Toward a Third Reconstruction
A conversation on The Nation, race and history at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Eric Foner, Darryl Pinckney, Mychal Denzel Smith, Isabel Wilkerson and Patricia J. Williams.
The Nation
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1965–2015
A forum for debate between radicals and liberals in an age of austerity, surveillance and endless war, The Nation has long had one foot inside the establishment and one outside it.
D.D. Guttenplan
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1915–1965
From World War I to Vietnam, from the red scare to McCarthyism, The Nation stood firm for civil liberties and civil rights, even when that meant being banned—or standing alone.
D.D. Guttenplan
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A Biography of ‘The Nation’: The First Fifty Years
Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation became a moribund defender of the status quo. But its firm anti-imperialism brought it back to life.
D.D. Guttenplan
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Nation’ Readers
On a Nation cruise, the maritime adventure I usually refer to as “Lefties at Sea,” I used to take it for granted that some of the guests were troubled by my presence.
Calvin Trillin
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Spreading Feminism Far and Wide
Straight talk about essentialism, sexism, leaning in and speaking out.
Betsy Reed and Katha Pollitt
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How to Lose Friends and Influence People
…and other tales from the “back of the book.”
Elizabeth Pochoda
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When Leftists Become Conservatives
It sure is a bracing feeling for the chair-bound intellectual to imagine himself the drivetrain in the engine of history.
Rick Perlstein
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The Dream Life of Desire
Drawing a line between poetry and the political has never been simple.
Ange Mlinko
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What We Can Learn From Andy Kopkind’s Energy, Edge and Radical Hope
How to be committed without drinking the Kool-Aid—and other things Andy taught me.
Maria Margaronis
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Cuba Libre
Covering the island has been a central concern for The Nation since the beginning—producing scoops, aiding diplomacy, and pushing for a change in policy.
Peter Kornbluh
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Freedom’s Song
Over The Nation’s 150-year history, each new generation of radicals and reformers has contested the promise—and the meaning—of freedom.
Eric Foner
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Separated at Birth
The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.
Ariel Dorfman
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How I Got That Story
“Stay to the end…and read everything”: Reporting the Iran/Contra scandal taught me everything I needed to know about covering Washington.
David Corn
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Lesser-Evilism We Can Believe In
Should we put government in the hands of a party determined to subvert it, or a party—however flawed—that believes it still has a role to play in securing the common good?
Michael Tomasky
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Weird Bedfellows
In their defense of “tradition” against the liberating potential of architecture, Prince Charles and Xi Jinping find unlikely common ground.
Michael Sorkin
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A Q&A With Marilynne Robinson
The novelist discusses religion, history, language and the importance of moral scrutiny.
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Some Disturbingly Relevant Legacies of Anticommunism
The impact of Cold War anticommunism on our national life has been so profound that we no longer recognize how much we’ve lost.
Victor Navasky
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Game Not Over
Despite the Gamergate backlash, a new generation of activists is working to end the racial, sexual and gender stereotypes promoted by the video-game industry.
Helen Lewis
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The Populist Moment Has Finally Arrived
Occupy Wall Street put inequality at the center of our politics. Only an independent movement will keep it there.
Robert L. Borosage
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Why Are Liberal Democracies So Bad at Creating Economic Equality?
The “Third Wave” of democracy in the Global South went hand in hand with the spread of policies that hobbled the fight for greater economic equality from the outset.
Walden Bello
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‘Why Do They Hate Us?’
It’s too easy to condemn the right’s populist attacks on Muslims—especially with so many left-wing atheists and liberal hawks joining the party.
Moustafa Bayoumi
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2005–2015: This All Seems Eerily Familiar
Nation writers on disaster capitalism, Blackwater, Obama, the financial bailout, austerity, Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin and Charlie Hebdo.
The Nation
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1995–2005: Our Enemies Cannot Defeat Us—Only We Can
Nation writers on sensationalist art, financial deregulation, September 11, The Sopranos, Texas, the Iraq war and reactionary conservatism.
The Nation
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How Saving the Environment Could Fix the Economy
Why not revive New Deal policies but apply them in a green and global fashion?
Mark Hertsgaard
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What Does ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Have to Offer 150 Years After Its Publication?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with The Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.
Marshall Berman
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There Cannot Be Peace and Security Until the Cause of Palestinian Suffering Is Addressed
There is a racist premise underpinning the “peace process” that Arab lives aren’t worth as much as Jewish lives.
Edward W. Said
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1985–1995: American Politics and Culture is Being Radically Reformed
Nation writers on late 1980s New York, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, gay rights, Rupert Murdoch's ambitions and the case for federal funding of the arts.
The Nation
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Adolph Reed Destroys ‘The Bell Curve’
Despite their concern to insulate themselves from the appearance of racism, Herrnstein and Murray display a perspective worthy of an Alabama filling station.
Adolph Reed Jr.
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Are Women Morally Superior to Men?
Woman as sharer and carer, woman as earth mother, woman as guardian of small rituals—these images are as old as time.
Katha Pollitt
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Is the UK Labor Party Too Moderate to Be in Power?
Its leaders speak the language of social concern, yet their strategy is marked by extreme caution, an avoidance of any appearance of radicalism.
Edward Miliband
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What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
Alice Walker
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Where Reaganism and Astrology Meet
It is scarcely news that the President is in the mainstream of popular American credulity. He has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.
Alexander Cockburn
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Christopher Hitchens Was Against the Buzzword ‘Terrorism’ Before He Was For It
The rulers of our world subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all.
Christopher Hitchens
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East, West—Is There a Third Way?
The cold war has become a habit, an addiction, supported by very powerful material interests in each bloc.
E.P. Thompson
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Can Women and Men Live Together Again?
I hope we might meet as rebels together—not against one another, but against a social order that condemns so many of us to meaningless or degrading work in return for a glimpse of commodified pleasures.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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When ‘Commentary’ Parroted ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’
Like it or not, Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat, and one would have to be pretty obtuse not to see the common danger.
Gore Vidal
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1965–1975: How To Tell The Rebels Have Won
Vietnam is a unique case—culturally, historically and politically. I hope that the United States will not repeat its Vietnam blunders elsewhere.
The Nation
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The Gospel According to Wendell Berry
To destroy a forest is an act of greater seriousness than we have yet grasped. But to destroy the earth itself is to destroy the possibility of recovery.
Wendell Berry and Wen Stephenson
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1955–1965: Down the Road of Folly
Nation writers on the Hollywood blacklist, Fiddler on the Roof and US hostility to revolutionary Cuba.
The Nation
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The Indignant Generation
The current crop of students has gone far to shake the label of apathy and conformity that had stuck through the 1950s.
Jessica Mitford
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When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In
Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta.
Howard Zinn and Paula J. Giddings
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The Article That Launched the Consumer-Rights Movement
Innumerable precedents show that the consumer must be protected from his own indiscretion and vanity.
Ralph Nader
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Voting Does Not Make a Difference
Democracy is dead in the United States. Yet there is still nothing to replace real democracy.
W.E.B. Du Bois
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1945–1955: We Face a Choice Between One World or None
The atomic bomb represents a revolution in science. It calls for a comparable revolution in our thinking.
The Nation
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The Reporter Who Warned Us Not to Invade Vietnam 10 Years Before the Gulf of Tonkin
A farsighted policy might do more to stem the Communist tide than sending a few more plane-loads of napalm.
Bernard Fall and Frances FitzGerald
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What Science Fiction Teaches Us About Reality
Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process which sends the salmon back upstream year after year to spawn and die—a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars?
Ray Bradbury
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What Is This New Philosophy They Call ‘Existentialism’?
It would be a cheap error to mistake this new trend in philosophy and literature for just another fashion of the day.
Hannah Arendt
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Americans and Their Myths
The country suffers from an ambivalent anguish, everyone asking, “Am I American enough?” and at the same time, “How can I escape from Americanism?”
Jean-Paul Sartre
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The Unconvincing Semi-Socialism of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
Many small towns are “backward” in a likable way, but I have never seen one so Norman-Rockwellish.
James Agee
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1935–1945: The Establishment of a Warless World Must Be Our Goal
Communists are intolerant and ruthless, often unscrupulous, but they are also zealous, brave, and willing to put up with hardship and abuse.
The Nation
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Which Direction Is the American Parade Headed?
Marching with the American Legion during the New Deal.
John Dos Passos
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John Steinbeck on the Violent Repression of the Fight for Migrant Workers’ Rights
We now know that workers are being attacked not because they want higher wages, not because they are Communists, but simply because they want to organize.
John Steinbeck
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1925–1935: Is Art Possible in the United States?
There is no best country to write in. There is only the old world and the new.
The Nation
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Langston Hughes and Touré on Loving Blackness in a Nation Ruled by White Supremacy
The Black artist still must confront the choice between being a messenger about the community and being a pure maker of artistic product.
Langston Hughes and Touré
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Was Europe a Success?
It would be intolerable to belong to a society which denied the freedom of expression.
Albert Einstein
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When the World Became a Huge Penitentiary
An eloquent portrait of underground life among the undocumented and the damned of the earth.
Emma Goldman and Vivian Gornick
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1915–1925: Radicals in a Time of Hysteria
Looking forward to a social order without any external restraints upon the individual.
The Nation
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Can Men and Women Be Friends?
Feminism has opened up far more space than could have been imagined in the 1920s.
Floyd Dell and Michelle Goldberg
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If We Repossessed Empty Homes, Homelessness Would Be Over
It will need a robust Mayor and city government to take the law into their own hands; but the people would support them.
William MacDonald and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio
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When the Constitution Becomes The Last Resort of Scoundrels
We know today the Founders were not Fathers to be proud of.
Simeon Strunsky and Richard Kreitner
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What Would Lincoln Think of Race Relations on His 100th Birthday?
The Nation’s publisher writes about “the negro problem” during the very week he helped found the NAACP.
Oswald Garrison Villard
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1895–1905: When the American Empire Was Born
Whenever a small force of Americans undertakes an expedition, the woods and hills become alive with enemies.
The Nation
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We Have Been Talking About Football’s Brutality for 120 Years
American parents should keep their sons out of the game.
The Editors
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1885–1895: Anarchists Are Vagabonds and Ruffians and Threaten Everything We Most Value on Earth
There is nothing likely to prove so effective a deterrent as death.
The Nation
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‘Nation’ Editor in the Gilded Age: Communism Will Lead to Smoking at Funerals and Mating in the Streets
Whatever power there is anywhere is to be lodged in the hands of the most stupid and incapable.
E.L. Godkin
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1875-1885: Custer’s Last Stand and the Power of Tammany Hall
Just as soon as one "boss" is evicted, another rises to take his place.
The Nation
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1865–1875: When Corporations Became America’s Aristocracy
Such sayings as, “The less government you have, the better,” were adopted as incontrovertible maxims.
The Nation
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Frederick Law Olmsted Surveys a City Burned to the Ground
Chicago's struggle to recover from the Great Fire is engaging the study of its best and most conservative minds.
Frederick Law Olmsted
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Walt Whitman Is An Insult To Art, Says 22-Year Old Henry James
Drum-Taps is the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
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How To Fix American Journalism
American journalism has lost its crusader instinct. Here’s how to get it back.
Michael Massing
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Unburying the Lede: 10 Free Story Ideas
US journalism needs investigative reporting, and these are great places to start.
Michael Massing
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The Future of a Failed State
Nations like Haiti don’t “fail” because of their people, but because they’ve been relentlessly exploited by the more “developed” world.
Amy Wilentz
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The Most Important Thing We Can Do to Fight Climate Change Is Try
The future will follow an unpredictable route, but we must still follow a compass called hope.
Rebecca Solnit
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Reclaiming Socialism
While honoring the legacy of American communists, a new generation of radicals has chosen to organize under the “socialist” banner.
Bhaskar Sunkara
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It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt
In America today, people owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards. But there’s a simple and elegant way to end this travesty.
Jon Wiener
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Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It
The “logic” of capitalist development has left a nightmare of environmental destruction in its wake.
Noam Chomsky
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Is Privacy Obsolete?
Thanks to the revolution in digital technology, privacy is about to go the way of the eight-track player.
David Cole
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The Big Fix
Bringing back a strong and healthy labor movement is everybody’s job—but to do it, we’ll have to change our corporate and political models as well.
Thomas Geoghegan
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Engendered
The trans community is coming out—and bringing with it a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
Mark Gevisser
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The Radical Future of Film
A more convivial, expansive and life-affirming future is with us now—and the movies can help take us there.
Stuart Klawans
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No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
Toni Morrison
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It’s Not Too Late: Save Democracy By Amending the Constitution
Corporations are not people, money is not speech, and votes must matter more than billionaires’ dollars.
John Nichols
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10 Steps to Transform American Society
An outline for social transformation in the United States, inspired by South Africa’s Freedom Charter.
Jack O’Dell
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Want to Rebuild the Left? Take Socialism Seriously
After three decades of neoliberal economic policies and the staggering inequality they have produced, we are witnessing a rebirth of socialist ideals.
Kshama Sawant
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Have We Reached the End of Jazz Itself?
John Coltrane and other “lost” musicians of the ’60s are teaching a new generation of artists to bend time and space.
Gene Seymour
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A World of Sports Worth Fighting For
Competitive athletics are far too important to leave to greedy businessmen and corporations.
Dave Zirin
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Editorial
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A Message From President Barack Obama
The Nation is more than a magazine—it’s a crucible of ideas.
President Barack Obama
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150 Years of Telling the Truth
Independence—one of the keys to The Nation’s longevity—has become ever more important in an age that urgently needs dissident and rebellious voices.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
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GET UNLIMITED DIGITAL ACCESS FOR LESS THAN $3 A MONTH!
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Column
Who’s Accountable for Ferguson’s Crimes? No One, It Seems
Here’s another reminder that “personal responsibility” is a principle relevant only to the poor and the black.
Gary Younge
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A Wake-Up Call for US Liberals
The state of conservative intellectual debate demonstrates the power of movement crazies.
Eric Alterman
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Books & the Arts
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Toward a Third Reconstruction
A conversation on The Nation, race and history at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Eric Foner, Darryl Pinckney, Mychal Denzel Smith, Isabel Wilkerson and Patricia J. Williams.
The Nation
-
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1965–2015
A forum for debate between radicals and liberals in an age of austerity, surveillance and endless war, The Nation has long had one foot inside the establishment and one outside it.
D.D. Guttenplan
-
1915–1965
From World War I to Vietnam, from the red scare to McCarthyism, The Nation stood firm for civil liberties and civil rights, even when that meant being banned—or standing alone.
D.D. Guttenplan
-
A Biography of ‘The Nation’: The First Fifty Years
Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation became a moribund defender of the status quo. But its firm anti-imperialism brought it back to life.
D.D. Guttenplan
-
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How to Lose Friends and Influence People
…and other tales from the “back of the book.”
Elizabeth Pochoda
-
The Dream Life of Desire
Drawing a line between poetry and the political has never been simple.
Ange Mlinko
-
Cuba Libre
Covering the island has been a central concern for The Nation since the beginning—producing scoops, aiding diplomacy, and pushing for a change in policy.
Peter Kornbluh
-
Freedom’s Song
Over The Nation’s 150-year history, each new generation of radicals and reformers has contested the promise—and the meaning—of freedom.
Eric Foner
-
Separated at Birth
The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.
Ariel Dorfman
-
Weird Bedfellows
In their defense of “tradition” against the liberating potential of architecture, Prince Charles and Xi Jinping find unlikely common ground.
Michael Sorkin
-
A Q&A With Marilynne Robinson
The novelist discusses religion, history, language and the importance of moral scrutiny.
-
Some Disturbingly Relevant Legacies of Anticommunism
The impact of Cold War anticommunism on our national life has been so profound that we no longer recognize how much we’ve lost.
Victor Navasky
-
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Game Not Over
Despite the Gamergate backlash, a new generation of activists is working to end the racial, sexual and gender stereotypes promoted by the video-game industry.
Helen Lewis
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The Case for Disengagement in the Middle East
It is time to walk away and leave the region to its own bad behavior.
Kai Bird
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2005–2015: This All Seems Eerily Familiar
Nation writers on disaster capitalism, Blackwater, Obama, the financial bailout, austerity, Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin and Charlie Hebdo.
The Nation
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1995–2005: Our Enemies Cannot Defeat Us—Only We Can
Nation writers on sensationalist art, financial deregulation, September 11, The Sopranos, Texas, the Iraq war and reactionary conservatism.
The Nation
-
How Saving the Environment Could Fix the Economy
Why not revive New Deal policies but apply them in a green and global fashion?
Mark Hertsgaard
-
What Does ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Have to Offer 150 Years After Its Publication?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with The Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.
Marshall Berman
-
There Cannot Be Peace and Security Until the Cause of Palestinian Suffering Is Addressed
There is a racist premise underpinning the “peace process” that Arab lives aren’t worth as much as Jewish lives.
Edward W. Said
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1985–1995: American Politics and Culture is Being Radically Reformed
Nation writers on late 1980s New York, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, gay rights, Rupert Murdoch's ambitions and the case for federal funding of the arts.
The Nation
-
Adolph Reed Destroys ‘The Bell Curve’
Despite their concern to insulate themselves from the appearance of racism, Herrnstein and Murray display a perspective worthy of an Alabama filling station.
Adolph Reed Jr.
-
Are Women Morally Superior to Men?
Woman as sharer and carer, woman as earth mother, woman as guardian of small rituals—these images are as old as time.
Katha Pollitt
-
Is the UK Labor Party Too Moderate to Be in Power?
Its leaders speak the language of social concern, yet their strategy is marked by extreme caution, an avoidance of any appearance of radicalism.
Edward Miliband
-
What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
Alice Walker
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Where Reaganism and Astrology Meet
It is scarcely news that the President is in the mainstream of popular American credulity. He has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.
Alexander Cockburn
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Christopher Hitchens Was Against the Buzzword ‘Terrorism’ Before He Was For It
The rulers of our world subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all.
Christopher Hitchens
-
East, West—Is There a Third Way?
The cold war has become a habit, an addiction, supported by very powerful material interests in each bloc.
E.P. Thompson
-
Can Women and Men Live Together Again?
I hope we might meet as rebels together—not against one another, but against a social order that condemns so many of us to meaningless or degrading work in return for a glimpse of commodified pleasures.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Is America Possible Without Empire?
Rather than sizzle or suffocate, let us get on with imagining a new America.
William Appleman Williams and Greg Grandin
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1965–1975: How To Tell The Rebels Have Won
Vietnam is a unique case—culturally, historically and politically. I hope that the United States will not repeat its Vietnam blunders elsewhere.
The Nation
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A Report From Occupied Territory
The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.
James Baldwin and Carrie Mae Weems
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The Indignant Generation
The current crop of students has gone far to shake the label of apathy and conformity that had stuck through the 1950s.
Jessica Mitford
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The Article That Launched the Consumer-Rights Movement
Innumerable precedents show that the consumer must be protected from his own indiscretion and vanity.
Ralph Nader
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Voting Does Not Make a Difference
Democracy is dead in the United States. Yet there is still nothing to replace real democracy.
W.E.B. Du Bois
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American Imperialism: This Is When It All Began
Accustomed to trampling democracy at home, jingoists cannot be expected to see its virtues abroad.
Horace White and Elinor Langer
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Clickbait Has Plagued Journalism for 125 Years
The dragging down of the mighty has been not unpleasing sport in all ages.
E.L. Godkin and Rochelle Gurstein
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We Have Been Talking About Football’s Brutality for 120 Years
American parents should keep their sons out of the game.
The Editors
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1885–1895: Anarchists Are Vagabonds and Ruffians and Threaten Everything We Most Value on Earth
There is nothing likely to prove so effective a deterrent as death.
The Nation
-
Frederick Law Olmsted Surveys a City Burned to the Ground
Chicago's struggle to recover from the Great Fire is engaging the study of its best and most conservative minds.
Frederick Law Olmsted
-
Walt Whitman Is An Insult To Art, Says 22-Year Old Henry James
Drum-Taps is the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
-
The Future of a Failed State
Nations like Haiti don’t “fail” because of their people, but because they’ve been relentlessly exploited by the more “developed” world.
Amy Wilentz
-
Reclaiming Socialism
While honoring the legacy of American communists, a new generation of radicals has chosen to organize under the “socialist” banner.
Bhaskar Sunkara
-
Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It
The “logic” of capitalist development has left a nightmare of environmental destruction in its wake.
Noam Chomsky
-
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The Radical Future of Film
A more convivial, expansive and life-affirming future is with us now—and the movies can help take us there.
Stuart Klawans
-
It’s Not Too Late: Save Democracy By Amending the Constitution
Corporations are not people, money is not speech, and votes must matter more than billionaires’ dollars.
John Nichols
-
Have We Reached the End of Jazz Itself?
John Coltrane and other “lost” musicians of the ’60s are teaching a new generation of artists to bend time and space.
Gene Seymour
-
The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.
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Letters
Letters
From Woodrow Wilson, Oswald Garrison Villard, G. Bernard Shaw, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Goldwater, Muhammad Ali, Abbie Hoffman et al.
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Crossword
Puzzle No. 3358
And don’t miss Kosman and Picciotto’s crossword blog, Word Salad.
Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto