Cover art by: art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA. New York, NY Jasper Johns (b. 1930). Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 30 5/8 x 45 1/2 x 4 5/8 in. (77 .8 x 115.6 x 11.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased with funds from the Gilman Foundation Inc., the Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman and Ed Downe, in honor of the museum’s fiftieth anniversary 80.32 Digital lmage © Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Encomiums from Elizabeth Warren, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and many more.
As The Nation looks forward to the next 150 years, we asked some contributors to StudentNation, the campus-oriented section of our site, and former Nation interns what a radical future looks like to them.
A forum for debate between radicals and liberals in an age of austerity, surveillance and endless war, The Nation has long had one foot inside the establishment and one outside it.
On a Nation cruise, the maritime adventure I usually refer to as “Lefties at Sea,” I used to take it for granted that some of the guests were troubled by my presence.
…and other tales from the “back of the book.”
Drawing a line between poetry and the political has never been simple.
How to be committed without drinking the Kool-Aid—and other things Andy taught me.
The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.
Should we put government in the hands of a party determined to subvert it, or a party—however flawed—that believes it still has a role to play in securing the common good?
The novelist discusses religion, history, language and the importance of moral scrutiny.
Occupy Wall Street put inequality at the center of our politics. Only an independent movement will keep it there.
Nation writers on disaster capitalism, Blackwater, Obama, the financial bailout, austerity, Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin and Charlie Hebdo.
Nation writers on sensationalist art, financial deregulation, September 11, The Sopranos, Texas, the Iraq war and reactionary conservatism.
Why not revive New Deal policies but apply them in a green and global fashion?
Nation writers on late 1980s New York, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, gay rights, Rupert Murdoch's ambitions and the case for federal funding of the arts.
Despite their concern to insulate themselves from the appearance of racism, Herrnstein and Murray display a perspective worthy of an Alabama filling station.
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
It is scarcely news that the President is in the mainstream of popular American credulity. He has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.
The rulers of our world subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all.
The cold war has become a habit, an addiction, supported by very powerful material interests in each bloc.
I hope we might meet as rebels together—not against one another, but against a social order that condemns so many of us to meaningless or degrading work in return for a glimpse of commodified pleasures.
Vietnam is a unique case—culturally, historically and politically. I hope that the United States will not repeat its Vietnam blunders elsewhere.
Nation writers on the Hollywood blacklist, Fiddler on the Roof and US hostility to revolutionary Cuba.
The current crop of students has gone far to shake the label of apathy and conformity that had stuck through the 1950s.
Innumerable precedents show that the consumer must be protected from his own indiscretion and vanity.
Democracy is dead in the United States. Yet there is still nothing to replace real democracy.
The atomic bomb represents a revolution in science. It calls for a comparable revolution in our thinking.
Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process which sends the salmon back upstream year after year to spawn and die—a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars?
Marching with the American Legion during the New Deal.
There is no best country to write in. There is only the old world and the new.
It would be intolerable to belong to a society which denied the freedom of expression.
Looking forward to a social order without any external restraints upon the individual.
The Nation’s publisher writes about “the negro problem” during the very week he helped found the NAACP.
Just as soon as one "boss" is evicted, another rises to take his place.
Such sayings as, “The less government you have, the better,” were adopted as incontrovertible maxims.
Chicago's struggle to recover from the Great Fire is engaging the study of its best and most conservative minds.
Drum-Taps is the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
A forum for debate between radicals and liberals in an age of austerity, surveillance and endless war, The Nation has long had one foot inside the establishment and one outside it.
…and other tales from the “back of the book.”
Drawing a line between poetry and the political has never been simple.
The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.
The novelist discusses religion, history, language and the importance of moral scrutiny.
Nation writers on disaster capitalism, Blackwater, Obama, the financial bailout, austerity, Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin and Charlie Hebdo.
Nation writers on sensationalist art, financial deregulation, September 11, The Sopranos, Texas, the Iraq war and reactionary conservatism.
Why not revive New Deal policies but apply them in a green and global fashion?
Nation writers on late 1980s New York, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, gay rights, Rupert Murdoch's ambitions and the case for federal funding of the arts.
Despite their concern to insulate themselves from the appearance of racism, Herrnstein and Murray display a perspective worthy of an Alabama filling station.
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
It is scarcely news that the President is in the mainstream of popular American credulity. He has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.
The rulers of our world subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all.
The cold war has become a habit, an addiction, supported by very powerful material interests in each bloc.
I hope we might meet as rebels together—not against one another, but against a social order that condemns so many of us to meaningless or degrading work in return for a glimpse of commodified pleasures.
Vietnam is a unique case—culturally, historically and politically. I hope that the United States will not repeat its Vietnam blunders elsewhere.
The current crop of students has gone far to shake the label of apathy and conformity that had stuck through the 1950s.
Innumerable precedents show that the consumer must be protected from his own indiscretion and vanity.
Democracy is dead in the United States. Yet there is still nothing to replace real democracy.
Chicago's struggle to recover from the Great Fire is engaging the study of its best and most conservative minds.
Drum-Taps is the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
From Woodrow Wilson, Oswald Garrison Villard, G. Bernard Shaw, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Goldwater, Muhammad Ali, Abbie Hoffman et al.
And don’t miss Kosman and Picciotto’s crossword blog, Word Salad.