Bluesky

As this dismal year draws to its dismal close, it’s somehow consoling to reflect on the lives we lost in 2025—beautiful writers, influential editors, and committed activists, cherished members of the extended Nation family—and to look back at the writings they contributed to the magazine. Their words offer a much-needed testimony to the long, turbulent struggle for decency, democracy, liberty, and equality in this country and around the world. Whatever violent delights 2026 has in store, the legacies of those who came before can and should serve as an inspiration and a guide.

Among the friends the magazine lost was the satirical artist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95. “Feiffer was America’s premier satirical cartoonist,” Jeet Heer wrote in an obituary, “the artist who best captured the tone and timbre of American public rhetoric and private anxiety from the time of Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton.”

In addition to his long-running weekly cartoon strip in the Village Voice, Feiffer wrote plays, movies, novels, memoirs. Heer noted that Feiffer’s best work came when he allowed his satire to be leavened with empathy for the subjects he skewered: “He often balanced political contempt with human sympathy.” He had mastered, partly through a lifelong engagement with theater and acting, “the ability to look at the world through the eyes of even the most unsympathetic soul.”

A few months before Feiffer’s death, Peter Kuper interviewed the legendary artist for The Nation. Feiffer had lost none of his dyspeptic bite in describing his trajectory from growing up in the age of Joseph McCarthy to living out his final years in the age of Donald Trump:

[S]haking the cage is what I found myself drifting into doing, and finding I had no choice but to do that because I was living in a country that scared the shit out of me in terms of the direction it was going. And if you ask me how I changed the country, well, today I find myself living in a country where I’m scared shitless because of the direction in which we’re going.

The Nation published a number of Feiffer’s articles, speeches, and cartoons over the years, including a prescient depiction in 1996 of the proto-Trump GOP presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, who grins mischievously as hordes of followers shout in joyous unison from the apparent safety of his enormous paws, about to be crushed.

In 1981, The Nation printed a version of a commencement address that Feiffer had given at the Pratt Institute about the mythology of “Movie America” in the age of Ronald Reagan. Though we live under a president shaped less by the formal demands of cinema than the must-watch spectacle of reality TV, it stills speaks to our moment:

With a hard-line ideology now in power, the stage is set for a debate that will prove or disprove arguments that have been chewed over for generations. Out of this debate will emerge a new American character either more authoritarian and repressive or more democratic and egalitarian. More curious and therefore more willing to suffer the complications and uncertainties that go with change or more willfully ignorant and arming to the teeth against the threat.

We are now full-fledged combatants in a war movie. A battle for the soul of the good old F.S.A.—the Fragmented States of America. I hope you’re on my side.

In April, the poet and critic Joshua Clover passed away at the age of 62. A professor of literature at the University of California, Davis, Clover was the author of a wide range of books spanning subjects from pop music to the political theory of riots, as well as several widely acclaimed poetry collections. Clover was long a fixture of The Nation’s Books and the Arts section. His first Nation review, published in 2007, concerned the poetry of Rod Smith, while his last was a sharp analysis and appreciation of The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann’s 2016 Netflix series on the origins of hip-hop. In between were almost impossibly erudite essays on topics from Baudelaire to economics, and a monthly column, “Pop & Circumstance,” which offered Clover’s perspective on country music, Game of Thrones, and Chomsky v. Zizek.

Juliana Spahr wrote in her Nation tribute to Clover that “there were so many Joshuas, often contradicting yet frequently overlapping.” There was “Joshua the Militant,” a committed activist to the end of his life, and there was “Joshua the Political Theorist,” “Joshua the Scholar,” “Joshua the Organizer of Summer Camps,” “Joshua the Conference Organizer,” “Joshua the Publisher of Commune Editions and Editor of Commune Magazine,” “Joshua the Tweeter, lover of barbs and jabs, the shit-talker, the contrarian,” “Joshua the Marxist,” “Joshua the Organizer of Long Bike Rides,” “Joshua the Academic,” “Joshua the Connoisseur of Gummy Candies.”

And then there was Joshua the Poet. He knew how to turn a phrase, build optimism, and remind us to love each other not just within occupied buildings but also within the short, limited lines of verse…. [I]f his writing is any one single thing, it is an invitation to join him in refusing to die.

Elizabeth Pochoda, a beloved literary editor of the magazine during much of the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, and a contributor for many years beyond that, died in May at the age of 83. Gene Seymour wrote a moving tribute to her:

She was one of those illuminated beings whose eyes entered a room—or your senses—before the rest of her did. Those wide pale orbs announced a hot-wired intensity that was at a higher, deeper level than most people were accustomed to casually encounter. To varying degrees, it was unsettling at first when Betsy aimed this intensity on you. Until you found out (and it usually didn’t take very long) that her focus was a gift, an acknowledgment that she’d seen something in you that aligned with her own formidable intellect and comprehensive passions. Such a meeting of minds promised fruitful and gratifying outcomes, especially if you were a writer and were lucky enough to have her as your editor.

Like Clover, Pochoda’s interests ranged widely, from her first pieces for the magazine, a two-parter on the latest Czech fiction, to her theater reviews of the 1990s and her brief column “Reading Around,” a kind of high-brown pre-internet aggregator of all the important essays and reviews and literary gossip worth taking notice of that week.

In addition to her involvement with many other publications, including Grand Street, which she helped found, and The Magazine Antiques, Pochoda kept writing for The Nation until shortly before her death, including tributes to former Nation comrades, Arthur Danto and Victor Navasky, an obit for Philip Roth, and meditations on American art and history.

In 2015, Pochoda wrote an essay for The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue reflecting on her tenure as literary editor—the freedom she enjoyed from the rest of the magazine that extended to her writers; the occasional political tensions and disagreements that resulted between the Books section and the rest of the magazine; her favorite pieces to reread—among them, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s 1986 critique of Joan Didion: “an outraged and outrageous piece,” Pochoda wrote, “wonderfully wrong occasionally and much more wonderfully right”.

Seymour wrote in his obituary, “Betsy’s range of interests and her unerring instinct for matching writers with subjects broadened her reputation as a versatile, incisive editor and solidified the devotion of writers who followed her wherever she went, benefiting from her solicitousness and enthusiasm toward their individual voices as well as her insights into how to amplify and enhance their work.”

What more can an editor do or be?

June brought the passing of Bill Moyers, one of the most influential journalists of the past 50 years. After beginning his career as a young aide and speechwriter to Lyndon Johnson, then as White House press secretary, Moyers grew disillusioned by the politically corrosive and morally indefensible Vietnam War. Leaving Washington, Moyers reinvented himself as a newspaper editor (at Long Island’s Newsday), then as a broadcaster, eventually becoming the most prominent media figure associated with public television.

Over more than four decades at PBS—which he had helped create, as John Nichols reminded us when Moyers died—he produced and hosted landmark series like Bill Moyers Journal and Frontline, as well as countless specials on topics such as money in politics, corporate power, racial justice, faith, environmental degradation, and the erosion of democratic norms. Even as commercial media aided and abetted the concentration of wealth and power at the top of society, Moyers insisted that journalism should be a form of public service rather than entertainment.

Moyers’s essays in our pages over the years touched on the corrupting influence of money in politics and the debasement of journalism in the age of media consolidation. In 2012, Moyers and his frequent collaborator, Bernard Weisberger guest-edited a special issue, “The 1 Percent Court.” In the wake of the Citizens United decision, the issue assessed just how hollow the justices’ commitment to democracy had become. In his introduction, Moyers explained what would be needed to fight back: “[T]he battle is on many fronts, and will be won not only by voters on election day but by citizens engaged at every level of democracy and in every peaceful form of protest. There can be only one response to this usurpation of democracy: defiance.”

In November and December, respectively, we lost Peter and Cora Weiss, indefatigable activists who had spent decades supporting human rights and civil liberties in the United States and around the world. “He never ceased to push for a more just system, a more equitable system,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive said of Peter, a path-breaking lawyer, on Democracy Now. “There’s not enough words to describe how important Peter was to the progressive movement, to human rights, over these last decades.”

Peter Weiss first wrote for The Nation in 1953 as a young attorney working in the field of international economic development. Through a long and illustrious career spent fighting to end the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, suing Henry Kissinger, and seeking restitution for victims of the US-backed Nicaraguan contras, among other causes, Weiss periodically returned to the magazine with new ideas and analyses. In 1993, he and two co-authors published a call for “Global New Deal.” The authors proposed replacing corporate-friendly trade pacts like NAFTA with “a new set of continental rules and measures, including the protection of labor rights and workplace health and safety standards.” Instead of signing agreements to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, he called for nations to team together to protect the environment, raise incomes for wage-earners, and divert military spending to socially beneficial purposes.

Cora Weiss, Peter’s longtime partner in both life and activism, died a month after her husband. She had written obituaries for The Nation about the German Green Party founder Petra Kelly and her fellow peace activist Dagmar Wilson. In 2016, she wrote a letter to the editor taking issue with an article the magazine had published that she considered overly critical and dismissive of the United Nations, where she worked with the International Peace Bureau. “The UN is only as good as its 193 parts,” she wrote. “Our world would be immeasurably worse without it.”

As it will be without these cherished friends of humanity, the nation, and The Nation. Let us profit from their wisdom.