When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Howard Zinn and Paula J. Giddings
There Cannot Be Peace and Security Until the Cause of Palestinian Suffering Is Addressed 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Edward W. Said
The Plain Sense of Things The Plain Sense of Things
December 6, 1952 After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. 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. Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) published ten poems in The Nation between 1936 and 1952.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Wallace Stevens
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
December 18, 1943 is an enchanted thing like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion. Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti; like the apteryx-awl as a beak, or the kiwi’s rain-shawl of haired feathers, the mind feeling its way as though blind, walks along with its eyes on the ground. It has memory’s ear that can hear without having to hear. Like the gyroscope’s fall, truly unequivocal because trued by regnant certainty, it is a power of strong enchantment. It is like the dove- neck animated by sun; it is memory’s eye; it’s conscientious inconsistency. It tears off the veil, tears the temptation, the mist the heart wears, from its eyes—if the heart has a face; it takes apart dejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s iridescence; in the inconsistencies of Scarlatti. Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it’s not a Herod’s oath that cannot change. 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. Marianne Moore (1887–1972) wrote eleven essays and seven poems for The Nation between 1936 and 1952. Moore’s biographer, Linda Leavell, indicates that she stopped contributing out of solidarity with her friend, ousted literary editor Margaret Marshall, but also because she disliked The Nation’s criticism of Eisenhower’s “honest, auspicious, genuinely devoted speeches.”
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Marianne Moore
When the World Became a Huge Penitentiary When the World Became a Huge Penitentiary
An eloquent portrait of underground life among the undocumented and the damned of the earth.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Emma Goldman and Vivian Gornick
The Indignant Generation 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Jessica Mitford
What Does ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Have to Offer 150 Years After Its Publication? 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 t...
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Marshall Berman
How I Got That Story 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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / David Corn
A Message From President Barack Obama A Message From President Barack Obama
The Nation is more than a magazine—it's a crucible of ideas.
Mar 23, 2015 / President Barack Obama
Was Europe a Success? Was Europe a Success?
It would be intolerable to belong to a society which denied the freedom of expression.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Albert Einstein