Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, has become president of The Nation. He joins us to talk about what independent media can and should do during wartime.

Also: “The Left in Purgatory”—at the end of a period of rapid politicization, settling into either gradual decline or slow advance.

Plus: the changing politics of comic books, from WWII to today: Critic J. Hoberman explains how comics served as wartime propaganda in the 1940s, how they were condemned as causing juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, how new kinds of superheroes emerged and then conquered Hollywood, and made billions for the studios—at a time when America was definitely not a superhero in the world. Hoberman reviewed the book Pulp Empire, by Paul S. Hirsch.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.