Night Thoughts Night Thoughts
On reverence, rebellion and other alternatives to social suicide.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / JoAnn Wypijewski
Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It
The “logic” of capitalist development has left a nightmare of environmental destruction in its wake.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Noam Chomsky
American Imperialism: This Is When It All Began American Imperialism: This Is When It All Began
Accustomed to trampling democracy at home, jingoists cannot be expected to see its virtues abroad.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Horace White and Elinor Langer
Americans and Their Myths Americans and Their Myths
The country suffers from an ambivalent anguish, everyone asking, “Am I American enough?” and at the same time, “How can I escape from Americanism?”
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Jean-Paul Sartre
East, West—Is There a Third Way? East, West—Is There a Third Way?
The cold war has become a habit, an addiction, supported by very powerful material interests in each bloc.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / E.P. Thompson
The Bear The Bear
April 18, 1928 The bear puts both arms round the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover And its choke-cherries lips to kiss goodby, Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall. (She’s making her cross-country in the fall.) Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in its staples As she flings over and off down through the maples, Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair. Such is the uncaged progress of the bear. The world has room to make a bear feel free. The universe seems cramped to you and me. Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage That all day fights a nervous inward rage, His mood rejecting all his mind suggests. He paces back and forth and never rests The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet, The telescope at one end of his beat, And at the other end the microscope, Two instruments of nearly equal hope, And in conjunction giving quite a spread. Or if he rests from scientific tread, ’Tis only to sit back and sway his head Through ninety-odd degrees of arc it seems, Between two metaphysical extremes. He sits back on his fundamental butt With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut (He almost looks religious but he’s not), And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek, At one extreme agreeing with one Greek, At the other agreeing with another Greek, Which may be thought but only so to speak. A baggy figure equally pathetic When sedentary and when peripatetic. 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. Reviewing Robert Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, in 1915, The Nation described him as “a poet by endowment,” but “a symbolist only by trade.” Frost (1874–1963) wrote four poems for The Nation in the 1920s. When he died, the sportswriter Roger Kahn wrote in the magazine of his friend: “Robert Frost is dead and my mortality and yours is thus more stark.”
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Robert Frost
Michael Moore for President Michael Moore for President
If nominated, I will run. If elected, I will serve.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Moore
A Wake-Up Call for US Liberals A Wake-Up Call for US Liberals
The state of conservative intellectual debate demonstrates the power of movement crazies.
Mar 23, 2015 / Column / Eric Alterman
It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt
In America today, people owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards. But there’s a simple and elegant way to end this travesty.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Jon Wiener
What Would Lincoln Think of Race Relations on His 100th Birthday? What Would Lincoln Think of Race Relations on His 100th Birthday?
The Nation’s publisher writes about “the negro problem” during the very week he helped found the NAACP.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / Oswald Garrison Villard