Can Women and Men Live Together Again? 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 glimp...
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Barbara Ehrenreich
The Bear The Bear
April 18, 1928 The bear puts both arms round the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover And its choke-cherries lips to kiss goodby, Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall. (She’s making her cross-country in the fall.) Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in its staples As she flings over and off down through the maples, Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair. Such is the uncaged progress of the bear. The world has room to make a bear feel free. The universe seems cramped to you and me. Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage That all day fights a nervous inward rage, His mood rejecting all his mind suggests. He paces back and forth and never rests The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet, The telescope at one end of his beat, And at the other end the microscope, Two instruments of nearly equal hope, And in conjunction giving quite a spread. Or if he rests from scientific tread, ’Tis only to sit back and sway his head Through ninety-odd degrees of arc it seems, Between two metaphysical extremes. He sits back on his fundamental butt With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut (He almost looks religious but he’s not), And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek, At one extreme agreeing with one Greek, At the other agreeing with another Greek, Which may be thought but only so to speak. A baggy figure equally pathetic When sedentary and when peripatetic. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Reviewing Robert Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, in 1915, The Nation described him as “a poet by endowment,” but “a symbolist only by trade.” Frost (1874–1963) wrote four poems for The Nation in the 1920s. When he died, the sportswriter Roger Kahn wrote in the magazine of his friend: “Robert Frost is dead and my mortality and yours is thus more stark.”
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Robert Frost
Weird Bedfellows Weird Bedfellows
In their defense of “tradition” against the liberating potential of architecture, Prince Charles and Xi Jinping find unlikely common ground.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin
Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Noam Chomsky
East, West—Is There a Third Way? 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / E.P. Thompson
The Fall of Rome The Fall of Rome
June 14, 1947 The piers are pummeled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend. Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay. Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. W.H. Auden (1907–1973) contributed many poems and critical essays to The Nation between 1938 and 1951.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / W.H. Auden
Separated at Birth Separated at Birth
The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Ariel Dorfman
What Are ‘Nation’ Interns Reading the Week of 3/22/15? What Are ‘Nation’ Interns Reading the Week of 3/22/15?
What Are ‘Nation’ Interns Reading the Week of 3/22/15?
Mar 21, 2015 / Books & the Arts / StudentNation
Why the New Film About the Gang Rape and Murder of Jyoti Singh Is Required Viewing Why the New Film About the Gang Rape and Murder of Jyoti Singh Is Required Viewing
The documentary has been banned in India—which makes watching it only more urgent.
Mar 20, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Nitasha Kaul
Silence and Slow Time Silence and Slow Time
The art of On Kawara.
Mar 20, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky