For the Jews—Life or Death? For the Jews—Life or Death?
An appeal for help from 1944.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / I.F. Stone
Tight Rope Tight Rope
July 13, 1963 We live in fragments like speech. Like the fits of wind, shivering against the window. Pieces of meaning, pierced and strung together. The bright bead of the poem, the bright bead of your woman’s laughter. 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. The Nation was one of the first major publications to print LeRoi Jones’s work, including his 1964 essay on the fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. Jones (1934–2014) later changed his name to Amiri Baraka.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / LeRoi Jones
Testimonials to ‘The Nation’ Testimonials to ‘The Nation’
Encomiums from Elizabeth Warren, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and many more.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature
Weird Bedfellows Weird Bedfellows
In their defense of “tradition” against the liberating potential of architecture, Prince Charles and Xi Jinping find unlikely common ground.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin
Home Song Home Song
March 24, 1926 Oh breezes blowing on the red hill-top By tall fox-tails, Where through dry twigs and leaves and grasses hop The dull-brown quails! Is there no magic floating in the air To bring to me A breath of you, when I am homesick here Across the sea? Oh black boys holding on the cricket ground A penny race! What other black boy frisking round and round, Plays in my place? When picnic days come with their yearly thrills In warm December, The boy in me romps with you in the hills— Remember! Paris, 1925 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. Claude McKay (1889–1948), author of the novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), only published this one poem in The Nation, but he also wrote three essays in the mid-1930s on race relations in New York City—including a firsthand report on the 1935 Harlem riot—and one travel dispatch from North Africa.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Claude McKay
1885–1895: Anarchists Are Vagabonds and Ruffians and Threaten Everything We Most Value on Earth 1885–1895: Anarchists Are Vagabonds and Ruffians and Threaten Everything We Most Value on Earth
There is nothing likely to prove so effective a deterrent as death.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / The Nation
Christopher Hitchens Was Against the Buzzword ‘Terrorism’ Before He Was For It Christopher Hitchens Was Against the Buzzword ‘Terrorism’ Before He Was For It
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.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Christopher Hitchens
1915–1965 1915–1965
From World War I to Vietnam, from the red scare to McCarthyism, The Nation stood firm for civil liberties and civil rights, even when that meant being banned—or standing alone.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / D.D. Guttenplan
Walt Whitman Is An Insult To Art, Says 22-Year Old Henry James Walt Whitman Is An Insult To Art, Says 22-Year Old Henry James
Drum-Taps is the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Henry James
John Steinbeck on the Violent Repression of the Fight for Migrant Workers’ Rights John Steinbeck on the Violent Repression of the Fight for Migrant Workers’ Rights
We now know that workers are being attacked not because they want higher wages, not because they are Communists, but simply because they want to organize.
Mar 23, 2015 / Feature / John Steinbeck