Print Magazine

January 2, 2006 Issue

William Greider writes that industrial society is on a collision course with nature and that the devastation of New Orleans is a metaphor fo…

Cover art by: Cover by Gene Case & Stephen Kling/Avenging Angels

Purchase Current Issue or Login to Download the PDF of this Issue Download the PDF of this Issue

Editorial

A Year of Sweet Victories

Among the sweetest victories of 2005: Social Security reform has been blocked, pressure to withdraw from Iraq is growing and progressive activists are making progress on local, sta...

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Sam Graham-Felsen

Conrad Black’s Fall

Reading Patrick Fitzgerald's sixty-page indictment of publishing magnate Conrad Black and his associates, one gets the feeling that the next stop for this high-living power-broker ...

Scott Sherman

The Ney Scandal Grows

As Justice Department investigators follow the cash flow from lobbyist Jack Abramoff's influence-peddling scandal, the evidence mounts against Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney. ...

Ari Berman

Gene McCarthy

Eugene McCarthy was a pure original, a great and good man, whose fundamental historical achievement was to be the standard-bearer for a moral and philosophical campaign against the...

George McGovern

New Orleans Blues

If New Orleans is to reclaim its greatness, the scope of the solution must match the scope of the problem. The city could become the nation's classroom by re-engineering levees, re...

The Editors

The War and the Elections

The Iraq debate will be a central issue of the 2006 Congressional elections, and there is reason to believe antiwar candidates will prevail. The first step in that process is to en...

The Editors

Column

Pyrrhic Victory

The best outcome for US policy is the hope that Shiite and Sunni fanatics can check each other long enough for the United States to beat a credible retreat and call it a victory, a...

Robert Scheer

Another 9/11? Never Mind…

The 9/11 Commission's startling follow-up report that savages the Bush Administration's inadequate efforts to protect the country from terrorism was met by the media with a collect...

Eric Alterman

Pentagon Secretly Paid to Place Articles In Iraqi Newspapers: Another Lesson in Democracy

Calvin Trillin

Letters

‘Nation’ Readers on the Iraq War

Our editorial statement that "The Nation will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the American war in Iraq a major issu...

Our Readers

Feature

Rembrandt’s Year

2006 marks Rembrandt's 400th birthday, and an array of exhibitions, from the sublime to the silly, will open in Amsterdam, Washington and beyond. As the aesthetic hype escal...

Abigail R. Esman

Dances With Ghosts

As the House of Representatives voted to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich decried the back-door methods and contemplated t...

Dennis Kucinich

Shoot the Moon

How realistic is it to stop the Bush Administration from pursuing its war agenda? Former prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega offers some hard-core advice about how to challenge the sta...

Elizabeth de la Vega

The Wonder and Horror of 2005

In the gloom of post-election 2004 few people, if any, could have anticipated the wild surprises of 2005. Focusing on three unforeseen developments of the past year, a meditation o...

Rebecca Solnit

Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas

Lenny Bruce was a lone voice at a time when irreverent comedy could land him in jail on obscenity charges. But the spirit of Lenny Bruce hovered over the first annual Comedy Festiv...

Paul Krassner

Apollo Now

Industrial society is on a collision course with nature. The devastation of New Orleans is a metaphor for what can happen next to us all. Will America decide to reshape the future ...

William Greider

Left to Die

If a society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners, we are in deeper trouble in New Orleans than we realize. The biggest prison crisis since Attica is now unfolding in the ...

Billy Sothern

Katrina Lives

The nation might believe it has moved on from Katrina, from the name so childish and somehow slightly foreign, not Sherry or Ann or Margaret. Moved on from the scenes of dar...

Susan Straight

In the Shadow of Disaster

Faced with the challenge of rebuilding, New Orleans seems stuck in the mud--not just mired in the muck caking the city but also trapped by centuries of policy mistakes, especially ...

Ari Kelman

Books & the Arts

Rembrandt’s Year

2006 marks Rembrandt's 400th birthday, and an array of exhibitions, from the sublime to the silly, will open in Amsterdam, Washington and beyond. As the aesthetic hype escal...

Abigail R. Esman

East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia

Pasted bumpily on brick, life-sized. Inside,
in a former foundry's casting vault, my father in the role
of Agamemnon died. A thin-browed bronze mask skating

Anne Winters

The Displaced of Capital

"A shift in the structure of experience..."
As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning, the city is ever alluring, but thousands of miles to the south

Anne Winters

MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements

We're aware in every nerve end of our tenement's hand-mortared Jersey brick, the plumbing's dripping dew-points, the electric running Direct, and on each landing four hall-johns fitted to the specifics and minima of the 1879 Tenement Housing Act. We lived in its clauses and parentheses, that drew up steep stairways and filled the brown airwells with eyebrowed windows. Unwhistling, the midwinter radiator lists in its pool of rust. A lightcord winds through its light chain; from a plasterless ceiling-slat topples a roach, with its shadow. Downstairs, our Sicilian widow beats the cold ribs with a long-handled skillet, and faucets drum in twenty old-law flats. Read More

Anne Winters

2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital, winner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, is a reflective, documentary and visionary volume of poetry inspired by the city of...

Robert Pinsky

Farewell to the Working Class

Two new books on indolence, How To Be Idle and Bonjour Laziness, issue low-energy cries for political apathy, a shorter work week and the fine art of slacking off.

Austin Kelley

The Oceanic Feeling

John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys abo...

Claire Messud

Middlemarch

The GOP is an object of popular loathing, yet prospects seem dim for ousting it from power. Three new books explain why: Off Center explores the GOP's genius for subverting ...

Eyal Press

Gene McCarthy

Eugene McCarthy was a pure original, a great and good man, whose fundamental historical achievement was to be the standard-bearer for a moral and philosophical campaign against the...

George McGovern

Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas

Lenny Bruce was a lone voice at a time when irreverent comedy could land him in jail on obscenity charges. But the spirit of Lenny Bruce hovered over the first annual Comedy Festiv...

Paul Krassner

Recent Issues
See All "swipe left below to view more recent issues"Swipe →

March 2025

February 2025

January 2025

December 2024

November 2024

October 2024

See All

Log In

January 2, 2006 Issue

Editorial

Column

Letters

Feature

Books & the Arts

Recent Issues