La Zone Grise
Alice Kaplan
Five books explore the sorrows and moral complexity of Irène Némirovsky and others who suffered Nazi persecution in France.
-
-
Who Are They Calling Elitist?
Eric Alterman : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Why do conservatives continue to feel oppressed by the "liberal elite"?
-
Beyond the New Deal
Howard Zinn : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
How refreshing it would be if a presidential candidate reminded us of the experience of the New Deal.
-
FDR's Democratic Propaganda
Stephen Duncombe : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Today's progressive message-makers can learn a lot from Franklin Roosevelt's homey "fireside chats."
-
Potent Publics
Anna Deavere Smith : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
The US public is wonderfully diverse, but the arts are not equally accessible to all.
-
Banana Kings
Emily Biuso : Agriculture
The history of banana cultivation is rife with labor and environmental abuse, corporate skulduggery and genetic experiments gone awry.
-
Art and Propaganda
Milton Glaser
Using fear and the classic tools of persuasion, the Bush Administration has subverted American mythology and our national character.
-
The Big Yam
John Feffer : China
Chinese hearts, minds and pocketbooks get a lot of attention from the Eastern and Western consumer markets.
-
New Old Things
Frances Richard : Non-Fiction
A new collection of short pieces by the prodigious and wide-ranging critic Luc Sante doubles as a history of Modernism's outlaws.
-
A Great Deal of Work
George Scialabba : Non-Fiction
Edmund Wilson's politics have long been criticized, but his views were more nuanced than you might think.
2007
-
Amnesia at the Multiplex
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Islam & Muslims
Two films address US adventures in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a big dose of historical amnesia, political pandering, moral superiority and outraged innocence.
-
Will the Real Generation Obama Please Stand Up?
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Electoral Politics
The cranky, quirky and sometimes progressive politics practiced by a generation once considered slackers could be a deciding factor in this presidential election.
-
Come On, People
Amy Alexander : African-Americans
A new book by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint is a tough-love prescription for social change. Why are critics in the black community piling on?
-
Susan Faludi: America's Terror Dream
Rashi Kesarwani : Media Coverage of the War on Terrorism
A discussion with the author of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, the master narrative of our national security myth.
-
The U.S. and the World (Editors' Introduction)
The 2008 election, more than any election in decades, will turn on questions of foreign policy and national security.
-
Latina America Lavishly Comes of Age
The quinceañera has become a rite of passage for even the poorest Latina teens, another example of our most treasured rites debased at the cash register.
-
Terry McMillan vs. Ghetto Lit
Amy Alexander : African-Americans
Driven by a tabloid episode from her own marriage, the novelist joins the debate over the mass marketing of trashy books to young black readers.
-
Taking Celebrity Seriously
Stephen Duncombe : Electoral Politics
The Paris Principle: politics are sooo hot.
-
The Diana/Whore Complex
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Feminism & Women
The lovelorn, fragile women the media once revered have given way to skank posses of the skinny, the slutty and the overindulged.
-
End of the Affair
The Nation Cruise drops its final anchor and its highly politicized passengers head for home.
-
A Rally in Juneau
Veterans for Peace in Juneau greeted the Nation cruise when it docked in their city with a rally against the war.
-
The Stuff of Heartbreak
Doug Henwood : Health, Science & Environment
When an ardently progressive magazine sponsors a cruise through the fragile waters off the coast of Alaska, the environmental, economic and human realities are ripe for contemplation.
-
I Didn't Throw Ralph Nader Overboard
In her latest shipboard dispatch, one passenger resists fear of global warming, is charmed by Rocky Anderson and manages not to do what so many others have contemplated.
-
The Lives of Others
Lois Gordon's new biography of Nancy Cunard brings the legendary heiress and activist back to life.
-
Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Epic
The last book in J.K. Rowling's saga is marked by throwaway references to a post-9/11 world and derivative insights that never add up to a coherent moral vision.
-
Nixon's Broadway Revival
Peter Morgan's new play is highly entertaining; Frank Langella's portrait of Nixon is brutally amusing; yet the play is historically inaccurate.
-
Cafe Society
Clive James's erudite new collection of essays celebrates the best of twentieth-century art, thought and politics.
-
Esperando a Mills
Recordamos la vida y el trabajo notable del sociólogo estadounidense quien a pesar de la fatiga de la Oficina Federal de Investigación se quedó muy dedicado a la revolución Cubana.
-
Waiting for C. Wright Mills
Remembering the remarkable life and work of the American sociologist who, despite FBI harassment, remained engaged in the Cuban Revolution.
-
Soft-Core Sexism
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Film Reviews
If movies reflect our shared consensus about right and wrong, Black Snake Moan speaks volumes about twenty-first-century America.
-
The Restless Mind
Jeremy Harding : Public Figures & Intellectuals
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag's posthumous collection of essays and speeches, reveals her rapt attention to the world around her.
-
The Church of Football
If the holiest day on the American calendar is Super Bowl Sunday, Vince Lombardi and Joe Namath were its early saints. So what does that make Pat Tillman?
-
Self-Consciousness Raising
What is the self? Do we all have one? Is it best treated with Botox or with books? Bohemian Los Angeles explains it all.
-
Mirror, Mirror On the Web
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Media Analysis
Web 2.0's greatest success capitalizes on our need to feel significant, admired and, above all, seen.
2006
-
2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Eleanor Lerman's poems sing a song that is bravely gloomy, but they sing it with a fierce and earned dignity.
-
The Plot Against Equality
Robert S. Boynton : Racism & Discrimination
Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble With Diversity challenges us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, define it.
-
Unhappy Meal
Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.
-
The Man Who Loved Children
Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate details the trials of a very smug and special class of parents raising children in post-9/11 New York.
-
Coming to America!
Reviews of films from the vulgar to the magisterial: Borat, Flags of Our Fathers, For Your Consideration, Our Daily Bread and Fur.
-
Cultural Famine: A Cycle
Famine is at its worst when people waste away and die. But there is another kind of famine: the death of the human soul--the emptiness and senseless cynicism in this country that has taken up residence in our hearts.
-
Death Trip
Philip Roth and Joan Didion have each written compellingly about death, but their insights about dying and mourning signify a retreat from the world rather than an embrace of the forces by which we all live and die.
-
The Missionary Position
Laila Lalami : Islam & Muslims
Like radical Islamists and American interventionists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin and Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today express great concern for Muslim women. But the trouble is not necessarily with Islam.
-
Keeping It Real
In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay examines modern debates over the relationship between theory and the lived world.
-
Dead Souls
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.
-
Zones of Disengagement
In Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini encapsulates the paradoxes that dominate discussion of the English cultural landscape.
-
High Culture, Low Politics
In The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolf Lepenies reflects on shifting manifestations of German philosophy and culture and considers the lessons they offer for Europe and the United States.
-
Love Letters
Richard Lingeman's Double Lives explores the richness of friendships between such literary lions as Hawthorne and Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Kerourac, Ginsberg and Cassidy.
-
On the Corner
David Margolick : New York City
Times Square may be the most dynamic urban space of the twentieth century, but you wouldn't know it from reading Marshall Berman's On the Town.
-
The Odd Couple
In Sound and Fury, sportswriter Dave Kindred examines the intersecting lives of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell.
-
Inside Man
Perry Anderson : Conservatives & The American Right
In America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama critiques the neoconservative movement and its disastrous defense of the Iraq War. But he remains fully committed to the unchecked use of American power.
-
Strangers in the Land
Corey Robin : Labor & Immigration
Human Cargo and The Rights of Others chronicle the plight of refugees and migrants, revealing how seemingly simple moral positions can assume toxic political form.
-
Brother From Another Planet
Eric Lott blasts "boomer liberals" in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, a manifesto that purports to breathe new life into radical politics.
-
The Color of Money
Four new books explore the politics, culture and racial awareness of the hip-hop generation.
-
A Letter to the American Left
Bernard-Henri Lévy : Human Rights & Civil Liberties
The American left is in a semi-comatose state, thanks to the striking ideological transformation wrought by its neoconservative battalions.
-
Easier Said Than Done
Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism explores the middle ground between the universal laws of liberalism and relativism's blind respect for all differences.
-
Harry Magdoff
The late socialist economist Harry Magdoff read Marx at fifteen and never looked back. A self-educated co-editor of the Monthly Review, he not only fought for a just and humane world; he embodied his politics in the way he conducted his life.
-
Of Queers and Kong
Richard Goldstein : Gay & Lesbian Issues & Activism
From Brokeback Mountain's closeted cowboys to King Kong's embrace of Anne Darrow, Hollywood has queered cherished icons of masculinity. But the two films paint a bleak picture: Love that falls outside the norm must struggle to be something more than self-destructive.
2005
-
Wartime Lies
As Nazis dropped bombs in Warsaw, poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote a collection of literary criticism that sought to trace the rise of totalitarianism by deconstructing the mythologies of Western modernity.
-
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 escalates, can great art withstand great commerce? Can consummate genius triumph over cute?
-
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.
-
The Look of Truth
Photographs are supposed to be unbiased recognitions of reality, but they're really self-portraits of the photographer. The Ongoing Movement, a blend of biography and analysis, examines what happens when photographers create deliberately untruthful pictures.
-
Octoberfest
Four editors of October magazine trace the history of contemporary art. Though Art Since 1900 seeks to be comprehensive, its writers leave out entire movements and impose moralistic judgments on the artists and art they profile.
-
Pop Torture
Pop culture does more than validate the claim that torture could help foil bombs seconds before detonation. In shows like 24, where scenes of sensory deprivation are mixed with family melodrama, torture is so routine that it seems one more plot device to create intimacy in characters. The reality is that torture isolates its victims from any sense of intimacy.
-
Rogue Scholars
Defenders of torture dwell not only in the White House and Pentagon, but in the halls of academia. When prominent law professors and academics cite the fantastic "ticking-bomb theory," they not only spread misinformation and foster a perpetual state of fear, but they use their credentials to legitimize a culture of torture.
-
Marxism and Form
Perry Anderson's Spectrum journeys through the abstract worlds of conservative and liberal intellectual thought, and leaves in its trail insights on the substance and style of ideas.
-
Succès de Scandale
American readers have long felt guilty about loving Lolita. As Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet heroine turns 50, Lila Azam Zanganeh traces the impact of a novel that has become both an icon and a cultural cliche.
-
Mystic River
Amartya Sen's latest collection of essays explores the rich flow of various peoples in and out of India and how they shaped the politics and spirituality of the nation today.
-
All the King's Media
William Greider : Media Analysis
The scandals suffocating the Bush Administration seem less like Nixon and Watergate and more like Louis XV and pre-Revolutionary France. They are harbingers of a potent cultural event that may jolt the public out of complacency.
-
The Power of Fear
Jill Lepore's New York Burning paints a realistic portrait of a purported slave rebellion in 1741 and the hysteria that followed, a harrowing lesson of how abusers of power become haunted by the nightmare of retribution.
-
I Wonder As I Wander
Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost plumbs the mysteries of losing oneself and finding oneself in the realm of the utter unknown.
-
State of the Magazines
Victor Navasky : Journalists & Journalism
On both sides of the Atlantic, liberal news magazines facing declining circulation have started to play into the celebrity culture. But there are gems that have the power to carry our culture through its Las Vegas-ization.
-
The Uncertainty Principle
By writing a novel about a conventional novelist writing about a conventional man, J.M. Coetzee's latest work illuminates the role of the novel and cuts through typical and tired theories on fiction.
-
Over My Dead Body
New biographies of Benito Mussolini and Marilyn Monroe contemplate exploitation of the body--in life and after death.
-
Rearranging the Furniture
For prose scholar Viktor Shklovsky, who lived by the code of style and studied its depths, an unhappy love affair can be as much a personal tragedy as a plot device for more writing.
-
Fighting the Abyss
Although The Aesthetics of Resistance delves into leftist notions of art and class struggle, this account of an anti-Nazi youth group in Germany seems outdated now.
-
In Search of Sam Cooke
A womanizing gospel king and black-pride pop star, Sam Cooke led a short life filled with contradiction.
-
New World Symphony
Russell Platt : Music Industry
Joseph Horowitz diligently lays out the immense problems that face American classical music today, and his warnings cannot go unheeded.
-
Barbara Ehrenreich's White Collar Blues
Barbara Ehrenreich probes a deeper level of white-collar angst: people who lose or quit their corporate jobs and routinely spend months, even years, finding another.
-
Rushdie's Receding Talent
It has almost become a sadness to review a novel by Salman Rushdie. Shalimar the Clown is no exception.
-
Zadie Smith's Indecision
It can't be easy to rein in a writer as successful as Zadie Smith. Her new novel, On Beauty, proves it's almost impossible.
-
Good Vibrations
Cristina Nehring : Gender & Sexuality
Orgasms used to be a secret, then they became a right. Now they're a duty.
-
Requiem for a Dream
Daniel Fuchs's The Golden West is best read as an author's requiem for the Hollywood he loved.
-
Optimism of the Will
Mike Davis : Journalists & Journalism
The rich legacy of former Nation editor and activist Carey McWilliams is on full display in three books.
-
Spectacle
Recent movies including War of the Worlds and Land of the Dead reflect today's political landscape.
-
Prosaic Judgments
Adam Kirsch prefers his own ideas about poetry to actual poems.
-
The Theater of Cruelty
Amitav Ghosh : Jails & Prisons
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were both a continuation and a divergence from historic prison practices.
-
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene remains a compelling figure in this moment of moral bankruptcy.
-
Just My Imagination
Russell Jacoby's study of utopian thought is a flawed treasure.
2003
-
Hors de Combat
Irony is the new Communism, which is why an artist like Madonna can't get her message across.
-
Neo-Macho Man
There is an uneasy similarity between Eminem and President Bush.
2002
-
1776 and All That
Edward Hoagland : September 11
Simple hedonism and materialism was not the point of crossing the ocean. Our revolution was better than that.
-
Patriotism's Secret History
Peter Dreier & Dick Flacks : Non-Fiction
Our most cherished national symbols--from the Pledge of Allegiance to "America the Beautiful" to Lady Liberty's poetry--are rooted in liberal ideals.
2001
-
Which America Will We Be Now?
Bill Moyers : Political Analysis
September 11 showed us true American heros. Now let's build on their strength.
2000
This week: Will racism or sexism win the day? Plus: Esther Kaplan on workplace safety and Steven Greenhouse on the struggle facing younger workers. (13mb mp3)
Get the best of The Nation on your Blackberry or Smartphone: mobile.thenation.com
