Books and Ideas

Roxane Gay on What Feminism Can Do in This Moment

Roxane Gay on What Feminism Can Do in This Moment Roxane Gay on What Feminism Can Do in This Moment

An interview with the best-selling author about her latest project, The Portable Feminist Reader.

Mar 25, 2025 / Q&A / Sara Franklin

Mary Ellen Solt, 1980.

The Concrete Poetics of Mary Ellen Solt The Concrete Poetics of Mary Ellen Solt

Her writing toed the line between fine art and poetry, asking readers to think of language as a multidimensional tool of communication and politics.

Mar 25, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Alyse Burnside

Dodger Jackie Robinson stealing home in a Cubs game on May 1, 1952.

Brooklyn Dodger 1, Draft Dodger 0 Brooklyn Dodger 1, Draft Dodger 0

Donald Trump picked on the wrong athlete. Even though Jackie Robinson died in 1972, last week he bested Trump in a contest about the role of racism and the civil rights movement.

Mar 24, 2025 / Peter Dreier

The Art of Separating: A Conversation With Haley Mlotek

The Art of Separating: A Conversation With Haley Mlotek The Art of Separating: A Conversation With Haley Mlotek

The Nation spoke with the author No Fault, a genre-bending examination of marriage and divorce that is one-part cultural history and one-part memoir.

Mar 24, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Gracie Hadland

JKF riding in a car through a parade.

JFK Assassination: The Final Secrets JFK Assassination: The Final Secrets

The release of the John F. Kennedy papers sets a standard for transparency that must also be applied to the current administration.

Mar 21, 2025 / Peter Kornbluh

A young boy peers out from a hole in a fence as his friends play basketball in a court where police officers are gathering for a patrol in East New York, 1966.

How White-Collar Criminals Plundered a Brooklyn Neighborhood How White-Collar Criminals Plundered a Brooklyn Neighborhood

Stacy Horn’s Killing Fields documents how East New York was ransacked by the real estate industry and abandoned by the city in the process.

Mar 20, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Kristen Martin

Mario Savio, a leader of the University of California Free Speech Movement, center, with Jack Weinberg and Susan Goldberg and other arrested demonstrators during their trial, Berkeley, California, 1965.

America Needs a New Free Speech Movement America Needs a New Free Speech Movement

Donald Trump is showing us what an unaccountable class of corporate decision-makers looks like—and it looks like a lot of fear, and a terrible loss of freedom.

Mar 19, 2025 / Zephyr Teachout

Sherrod Brown: Three decades of talking about the dignity of work wasn’t enough to save him.

How the American Left Became Conservative How the American Left Became Conservative

Against the radical, if reactionary, experiment run from the White House, everyone from Democratic leaders in Congress to MSNBC hosts have turned to the defense of institutions.

Mar 18, 2025 / Michael Kazin

Trump Took Over the Kennedy Center, but Silencing the Arts Will Not Be So Easy

Trump Took Over the Kennedy Center, but Silencing the Arts Will Not Be So Easy Trump Took Over the Kennedy Center, but Silencing the Arts Will Not Be So Easy

Our last best hope for sharing, shaping, and wrangling over independent ideas may turn out to be America’s scrappy and disparate arts spaces—if they can hang on financially.

Mar 18, 2025 / Alisa Solomon

A view of the Butano Redwood Canyon in Pescadero, California, 2011.

Why “The Living Mountain” Endures Why “The Living Mountain” Endures

Nan Shepard’s classic of nature writing and memoir is an education in how to reorient one's attention to a landscape and its lifeforms, human and nonhuman.

Mar 13, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Jenny Odell

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