Contact: Caitlin Graf, The Nation, press [at] thenation.com, 212-209-5400

New York, NY—September 29, 2016—The Nation, America’s leading magazine of progressive politics and culture, today launched two new columns that look beyond the election cycle to confront and decipher the political challenges occurring within and outside our borders. The columns will alternate publication in print and online.

Contributing editor Robert L. Borosage (@Borosage) will write a weekly column, “Insurgencies,” exploring the emerging strategies linking people in motion with progressive champions in office, and exposing the big lie that there are no alternatives. His first, “Wells Fargo Crooks Stole From Customers, Reaped Obscene Rewards—and Stuck Us With the Bill,” appears in the October 17, 2016 edition of the magazine. He is based in Washington, DC.

Former Salon and New Yorker correspondent Patrick Lawrence (@TheFloutist) joins The Nation as contributing writer, with a biweekly column on developments around the globe—offering pointed critiques of, and answering pressing questions on, foreign policy and its coverage by the mainstream media. His first, “The Russian Blitzkrieg on Aleppo Is a Direct Challenge to Washington,” parses the conflict in Syria and the critical precipice the US government faces in this post–Cold War crisis. He divides his time between New York City and Norfolk, CT.

“It is exciting that Robert Borosage, one of our country’s most cogent commentators on the battle of ideas between the Democratic establishment and the ascending progressive/populist movement, will use his weekly column to probe the clash between people and plutarchs, failed shibboleths and new ideas,” says Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel.

“The Nation has long cast its gaze beyond our country’s border, and Patrick Lawrence’s encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs and deep understanding of historical fault lines will be an integral addition to our work,” she adds. “He joins a wealth of Nation voices—Juan Cole, Maria Margaronis, Greg Grandin, Stephen Cohen, Barbara Crossette, Michael Klare, and James Carden—in offering probing, contextualized, and forward-looking commentary on international relations, and America’s role in navigating those relationships.”

“This is a time of growing turmoil,” says Borosage. “The dominant elite consensus has enriched the few, but failed most Americans. People’s movements—Occupy, the Dreamers, Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the Sanders presidential campaign and more—demanding fundamental change. Entrenched interests and corrupted big money politics stand in the way. ‘Insurgencies’ will offer periodic reports on this clash. We’ll probe the forbidding challenge of turning protest into power. And we’ll aim to live up to what Mr. Dooley called the central task of journalism—afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.”

“The medium being part of the message, The Nation is the best environment I can think of for the column,” adds Lawrence. “Foreign policy figures in the American conversation more than it has since the Vietnam period, and vigorous, uncompromised critique is at least as important now as then. There’s no separating foreign policy from domestic conditions—there never was, of course—and this will come through in the context The Nation gives me. More personally, my first piece in The Nation appeared 40 years ago—1976. So it’s a special kind of pleasure to go on the masthead.”

Robert Borosage, a leading progressive writer and activist, is founder of a number of progressive organizations including, most recently, the Campaign for America’s Future, ProgressiveMajority, and ProgressiveCongress.org. He guided the Institute for Policy Studies for nearly a decade. Borosage served as issues director for the Jesse Jackson 1988 presidential campaign, and consulted on many progressive campaigns, including Senator Paul Wellstone and most recently, Representative Jamie Raskin. A contributing editor of The Nation, Borosage’s articles have been published by Reuters, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Patrick Lawrence is a longtime columnist, essayist, critic, and lecturer. Most recently the foreign affairs commentator for Salon, he was a correspondent abroad (writing as Patrick L. Smith) for many years, chiefly for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, and chiefly in Asia. Apart from his staff work, Lawrence’s reportage, commentary, essays, criticism, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Business Week, Time, The Washington Quarterly, World Policy Journal, The Globalist, The Nation, Asian Art News, and numerous other publications, and he won an Overseas Press Club Award for his reportage from Korea during the last years of the dictatorships. Lawrence’s most recent books are Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World and Time No Longer: America After the American Century (Yale). More information available at: www.patricklawrence.us.

Borosage and Lawrence join a host of Nation journalists, columnists and editors offering essential commentary and in-depth reporting throughout this campaign season and into the next presidency. Nation writers—including Joan Walsh, John Nichols, Eric Alterman, Ari Berman, Zoë Carpenter, William Greider, D.D. Guttenplan, Dani McClain, Katha Pollitt, Mychal Denzel Smith, Patricia Williams, Kai Wright, Gary Younge, George Zornick, and more—move past the horse race to take seriously outside voices and alternative perspectives in our politics. They provide timely analysis, crucial context to breaking news, and dynamic reporting on under-covered issues of race, immigration, inequality, labor, health, social justice, voting rights, women’s rights, and American democracy.

For booking requests or further information, please see contact information above.

About the magazine:

Founded in 1865, The Nation is America’s leading independent magazine of progressive politics and culture, serving as a platform for investigative reporting and spirited debate on issues of import to the progressive community. Through changing times and fashions, The Nation and TheNation.com offer consistently informed and inspired reporting and analysis of breaking news, politics, social issues and the arts—never faltering in our editorial commitment to what Nation Publisher Emeritus Victor Navasky has called “a dissenting, independent, trouble-making, idea-launching journal of critical opinion.”

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