How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism

Encompassing everything from the ecosystems novel to sci-fi, a growing body of literature is imagining and interrogating the past, present, and future of the planet's climate.

Lynne Feeley

How to Fornicate

Kemi Alabi

The Building Blocks of History

A conversation with Richard Cohen about Making History, his lively defense of narrative history, and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

Walker Mimms

Learning and Healing in the Archive of Black Thought

Farah Jasmine Griffin’s memoir Read Until You Understand doubles as a syllabus, taking readers on a personal tour through Black intellectual history.

Edna Bonhomme

The Long Shadow of the Fatwa

We don’t know the motives behind the attack on Rushdie yet, but it is just one more threat to his life in a series of them.

Jeet Heer

The Broken College Ranking System

A fairer rankings system would highlight universities like Georgia State and CUNY, whose mission is to help students from poor families enter the middle class, rather than fixating on institutions like Yale and Princeton, which burnish the prone-to-success credentials of their students.

David Kirp

Julius Eastman’s Great Expectations

The neglected music of a revolutionary 20th-century composer continues to shock and awe.

David Hajdu

The Photographs of the Border

In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist David Bacon offers a politically rich, bilingual compilation of photographs and oral histories.

Aviva Chomsky

Steven Thrasher on “The Viral Underclass”

The Nation spoke with Thrasher about who makes up the viral underclass—the subject of his new book—and what we should do to confront the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Charlotte Rosen

The Toxic History of the Salton Sea

A new book by Traci Brynne Voyles catalogs the alarming events that created one of the West’s most polluted bodies of water.

Kyle Paoletta