Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2015 i The Nation

Freda Kirchwey, the first woman editor of The Nation, said, “Anniversaries should be approached without awe.” That was seventy-five years ago. The Nation’s longevity over 150 years is a remarkable feat—especially in our fast-changing media landscape. For the magazine to survive and thrive for another century and a half, however, The Nation will have to adapt. Indeed, sixty years ago, Kirchwey’s successor Carey McWilliams declared: “The Nation must change, as it has changed in the past, if only to encompass certain harsh realities of present-day American journalism.” The Nation, he added, has a “special responsibility to report the significant happening that might otherwise go unreported, to air unpopular views and controversial issues.” When every day seems to bring the demise of another iconic voice, and the news is increasingly dominated…

In the wake of the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly had some advice for black America: “Don’t abandon your children. Don’t get pregnant at 14. Don’t allow your neighborhoods to deteriorate into free-fire zones. That’s what the African-American community should have on their T-shirts.” (That’s either a very big garment or very small lettering.)
 Whenever black kids get shot, black parents get lectured about personal responsibility. If you raised your kids better, goes the conservative logic, we wouldn’t have to shoot them. Arguments about systemic discrimination and racist legacies are derided as liberal excuses for bad behavior. Neither history nor economics nor politics made Mike Brown grab Darren Wilson’s gun—that was his choice. Individuals, we are told, are responsible for their own actions…

The Great Festival Editorial July 6, 1865 Before this meets the eyes of our readers, the Fourth of July will have been celebrated, and never before have we had such cause of rejoicing. It is not simply the birth of the nation which we now commemorate, but its regeneration. We celebrate not only the close of a long and bloody civil war, but the close of that “irrepressible conflict” which absorbed all the intellect of the country, perverted its understanding, corrupted its morals, and employed most of its moral and mental energy, either in the attack or defence, in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, of one of the worst forms of barbarism;—a conflict which began to exercise a paralyzing influence on industry and to poison social intercourse. We…

Hawaiian Annexation Editorial (Horace White) November 25, 1897 The feature of the proposed annexation of Hawaii which ought to excite the most comment and the greatest repugnance has received scarcely any attention, and among the advocates of annexation none at all. This is the fact that the American republic, based upon the doctrine that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, proposes to change the government of a distant country without asking the consent of the governed in any way whatever. Does this betoken a change in ourselves? So it would seem. 
 That Senator Morgan of Alabama should argue this question as though the people of Hawaii have no rights which white men are bound to respect, is not to be wondered at. He…

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…

When Nikita Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush a grassroots uprising in 1956, many radicals chose that moment to stop apologizing for the Soviet Union. Ronald Radosh, a red-diaper baby who published seventeen articles in The Nation between 1966 and 1980, decided it was time to join the Communist Party USA. 
 Later, when sane people were celebrating the end of the Vietnam War, Radosh and those around him regarded the moment as “an occasion for deep melancholy.” They liked the Vietnam War, he explained in his memoir, Commies; it gave their lives meaning. Now that our country was no longer laying waste to Third World peasants, America, for these folks, “could no longer so easily be called Amerika.” And now that the exigencies of war could no longer…

In this e-mail discussion, which took place in January 2015, “Subject to Debate” columnist Katha Pollitt and former executive editor Betsy Reed, now editor in chief of the Intercept, reflect on the state of contemporary feminism, both in the nation and in The Nation.
   Reed: In December 1992, sitting at my messy editorial assistant’s desk in the offices of the glossy magazine where I worked at the time, I read your Nation essay, “Are Women Morally Superior to Men?” I didn’t know you personally yet, but as a reader, I hung on your every word. And here were 6,000 of them, so bracing and brilliant that the moment of encountering that essay was seared into my memory with the sort of clarity that usually attends only the tragic or…

It was a lovely, crisp autumn morning in the nation’s capital in November 1987, and I was strolling through a well-tended park on Capitol Hill and feeling quite privileged. I had only been in the city for ten months, as a correspondent for this magazine, and I was about to be one of the few people in town to obtain a copy of the hottest document produced by Washington in years: the final report of the House and Senate committees investigating the Iran/Contra affair. This scandal was a doozy: President Ronald Reagan had secretly (and arguably illegally) sold weapons to the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran in order to free American hostages, and his crew had used the ill-gotten proceeds to secretly (and arguably illegally) finance the not-so-covert guerrilla army attempting…

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”
 Alice in Wonderland. Does Alice in Wonderland have anything to teach readers of The Nation today, any lessons for the decades ahead? Any wisdom that might have helped readers of the magazine over the last century and a half in their search for a more just, nonviolent, humane world—if they had only been open to the possibility? 
 These questions are less bizarre than they might immediately appear. For starters, Lewis Carroll’s comic masterpiece and the weekly where this essay is being published had almost simultaneous beginnings. Only two scant days separate July 4, 1865, when the adventures of Alice first saw light in London, from July 6 of that same year, when The…

The United States and the Artist Zona Gale July 1, 1925 Can an artist exist and function freely in the United States? I think that he can do so if he knows where and how.
 Certain hazards among us are to be conceded and survived, and if the artist is a Negro, his difficulties are needlessly greater in this country than in any other land in the civilized world. In general, [though,] the great United States handicap is none of these. It lies deeper and is not to be conquered by praise or fellowship or loaf and flask. 
 It is the lack in the national life of that indefinable control by the ordered, the accustomed, the mellow, the dreaming, the old. We know that we are without memories or…

I Won’t Vote W.E.B. Du Bois October 20, 1956 I shall not go to the polls. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the ballot in a few states, a “Socialist” Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by “force and violence.” Anything he advocates by way of significant reform will be called “Communist” and…

Next to climate change, inequality is the burning issue of our time. In this regard, the evidence presented by Thomas Piketty, the United Nations and other sources is quite conclusive: the current rates of global inequality are unprecedented. 
 In his celebrated book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty marshals a massive amount of data to show that rising inequality has been the norm since capitalist growth took off in the eighteenth century. Now, he says, things are likely to become even worse.
 The only period when there was a reversal of this flow, Piketty writes, occurred in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when what he calls “exogenous shocks”—such as wars and the social revolutions they triggered—forced capitalist elites to make economic concessions. These social compromises were largely…

Back when I was a much younger man, I worked briefly for a Democratic member of Congress from my home state. (This was when West Virginia still had Democratic members of Congress.) I performed the sorts of duties still executed by eager young things today, unglamorous tasks but nevertheless important ones to the good taxpaying people back home: answering constituent mail, helping widows get their husbands’ black-lung benefits and so on.
 One morning, a union man from my hometown called the office. There was a painting job being done at a Department of Energy facility somewhere in the district. The company that won the contract to do the painting, my union man explained, was trying to pay less than the “prevailing wage,” the typical hourly wage for the area as…

Late last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping rose to his bully pulpit to denounce the surfeit of “weird architecture” that has become so visible on the Chinese skyline, calling instead for an art that would “disseminate contemporary Chinese values, embody traditional Chinese culture and reflect [the] Chinese people’s aesthetic pursuit.” While there’s something heartening about a national leader who actually cares about architecture, a wave of disquiet rapidly spread among both the Chinese and foreign designers (including yours truly) whose work might be implicated in its failure to embody the latest, unspecified version of the eternal verities. Whenever I hear that word “tradition,” my trigger finger gets itchy; “weird” is one of the signatures of experiment and the new. But “weird” also signifies the surreal juxtapositions that are second nature…

Immediately following the January attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the liberal hawk George Packer wrote a screed on The New Yorker’s website, proclaiming that “Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance…a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique.” Also in January, Dissent posted “Islamism and the Left,” a long essay by the liberal philosopher Michael Walzer, composed before the Paris attacks, in which he wrote: “Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf.” And last October, self-proclaimed liberal Bill Maher told the guests on his HBO show Real Time, which included the writer and militant atheist Sam Harris, that “liberals need to stand up for…

By 1978, the term “liberal” had acquired all sorts of baggage, from Hubert Humphrey’s timorous silence over the Vietnam War to the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s brutal response to a revolt by inmates at Attica Correctional Facility. For the generation that came of age in the 1960s, “liberal” just didn’t cut it. And by his own admission, Victor Navasky was a liberal.
 But like every new editor, Navasky wanted to shake things up. He and publisher Hamilton Fish asked graphic legends Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard to redesign the magazine. And when New Republic owner/editor Martin Peretz responded to a story in The New York Times reporting that a “feud” had developed between the two liberal journals following The New Republic’s shift “to the right” with a letter insisting “We…

Terrorism and Its Discontents Christopher Hitchens August 3, 1985 Terrorism threatens to emerge as one of the great junk subjects of our era. It has already generated numerous junk seminars, endless junk TV shows, about half a dozen junk tanks and countless junk speeches and junk books. Plus which, it has evolved a whole breed of cretinous monomaniacs—junk experts—who fill the screens and the Op-Ed pages with their junk lucubrations. Herewith, then, my two cents’ worth of junk reflections.
 “Terrorism” was a buzzword of the Reaganites from the start. I remember attending a debate in 1981 in which the reactionary side was taken by a man named Constantine Menges. The fact that Menges now directs terrorist operations against Nicaragua from the safety of the National Security Council is both here…

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.
 I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine—and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election….” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.…

In the fall of 1979, the Rev. Jesse Jackson invited me to accompany him on a ten-day visit to South Africa, coordinated by the African National Congress. Everywhere we went, from Cape Town to Durban, from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, the Freedom Charter would come up at some point in our conversations. This document, drafted by the ANC, had been discussed and modified by gatherings all around the country before being adopted at a nationwide assembly in Kliptown in 1955. Its vision—of a South Africa with civil, human and economic rights for all—would serve until the end of apartheid to unite the freedom movement in all of its sectors and to inspire hope and confidence in ultimate victory, despite the pain of the struggle and the ruthlessness of the regime.…

January 25, 1965 The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep insect-like. Guess, who was the insect. I’d asked him in my robe & hospital gown in the elevator politely why someone saw so many police around, and without speaking he looked. A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep across my nervous system some time ago wrecked. I saw the point of Loeb at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly, baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound attend while he is cooked until with trembling hands hoist I my true & legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains— it’s the texture & the thought— but I will like them now, spooning at you, my guardian, slowly, until at length the…

1. 
 There has always been another world. In Neolithic times, they built megaliths, steles, timed to the solstices—so they had some astronomical sense. Failing that, there was always a saber-toothed tiger to run them down. In the Grecian Bronze Age was invented the cast of maniac characters known as the gods—each with a different competitive function usually attached to features of the natural world, but showing clearly an awareness of something in existence other than humankind. The pre-Socratics scientized this and spoke of elemental forces that powered the world, and they argued as to which were more elemental than others—water, fire, air or earth. Then came Democritus with his astonishing theory of the invisible atom as the basis of everything. Plato allegorized the problem, describing a cave of firelit…

For progressives committed to reasoned debate about public ends—competent democratic government, peace and broadly shared prosperity, an environment that will allow human flourishing in future generations—these are dark times. 
 In international affairs, when one considers the medieval sectarian religious violence of ISIS (but with modern weapons!); the rising income and political inequality to be found nearly everywhere; our abject failure to arrest species-extinguishing carbon emissions; the private-investor coup of the Trans-Pacific Partnership; a revived Cold War with Russia; and unending air wars on Islamic terrorists that chiefly fuel their recruitment base, there is little trace of an effective progressive presence—or sometimes even sanity. 
 And in national politics, especially in the rich countries of North America and Europe, things seem even worse. There, for a long generation after World…

1. The most important man in finance. As the head of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, Laurence Fink oversees the investment of more than $4 trillion in assets. The company is so huge and a party to so many federal contracts that many think it’s too big to fail. As a senior bank executive told Vanity Fair, the company is “like the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government.” Yet it—and Fink—are barely known outside Wall Street. 
 2. Deficit slayer. Peter Peterson, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, a private- equity firm, has funneled $1 billion into the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and other initiatives aimed at reducing the federal deficit, balancing the budget and cutting safety-net programs. His efforts have earned support among the political elite—a classic…

Walt Whitman got it right, ten years before the founding of The Nation, when he advised Americans to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul….” This goes double for the left, which cannot afford to neglect the crumbling infrastructure of our democracy, or to treat as sacrosanct a creaking constitution that thwarts rather than extends the will of the people.
 Nothing locks in inequality and dysfunction like a constitution so imprecise that it allows right-wing judicial activists to make buying elections easy and voting in them hard. But don’t just blame “constitutional conservatives” for turning our founding document into an outline for oligarchy. Fret about liberal constitutionalists who imagine we’re just one thrilling presidential appointment away from…

As a labor lawyer, I hate it when people pat me on the head and say, “Do you think the labor movement will ever come back?” As if it’s my problem and not theirs. Or as if it’s something that “the unions” or “organized labor” have to do—not, as I think, an obligation that we all have as citizens. 
 I can give the usual, often hackneyed reasons for bringing back a labor movement. For starters, we need to raise wages—a lot—or there will be no middle class. From 2000 to 2012, the pay of the bottom 70 percent of Americans was flat or falling, even as non-farm productivity rose 30 percent. If we choose a longer time frame, it’s even worse: since 1979, pay for most workers has barely…

As The Nation looks forward to the next 150 years, we asked some young people in our orbit what a radical future looks like to them. The following are from contributors to StudentNation, the campus-oriented section of our site, and former Nation interns. You can read more submissions at TheNation.com.
 * * * Chloe Maxmin
 Senior, Harvard College, and StudentNation contributor
 I am 22 years old, and i have been a climate activist for ten years. My call is for a radical future now.
 I look into my future, and I am scared. I know that climate change will define my life no matter what. I also know that this is true for everyone on our planet, especially the global poor on the front lines of fossil-fuel use. 
 Meanwhile,…

September 15, 2008 And we love life if we find a way to it. We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees. We love life if we find a way to it. And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure. We open the garden gate for the jasmine to step out on the streets as a beautiful day. We love life if we find a way to it. And we plant, where we settle, some fast growing plants, and harvest the dead. We play the flute like the color of the faraway, sketch over the dirt corridor a neigh. We write our names one stone at a time, O lightning brighten the night. We…

In an era of instant, 140-character news cycles and reflexive toeing of the party line, it’s incredible to think of the 150-year history of The Nation. It’s more than a magazine—it’s a crucible of ideas forged in the time of Emancipation, tempered through depression and war and the civil-rights movement, and honed as sharp and relevant as ever in an age of breathtaking technological and economic change. Through it all, The Nation has exhibited that great American tradition of expanding our moral imaginations, stoking vigorous dissent, and simply taking the time to think through our country’s challenges anew.
 If I agreed with everything written in any given issue of the magazine, it would only mean that you are not doing your jobs. But whether it is your commitment to a…

A week before his 2009 inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama chose as his first high-profile social engagement a dinner party at George Will’s house, where he was joined by William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. Obama no doubt intended to demonstrate his desire to reach across the ideological divide and engage his neoconservative critics in a healthy debate. Conservatives saw a president they could roll.
 Part of the problem was Obama’s misplaced confidence that he could heal the divisions forged in the Bush era. A second complication arose from his unique position as the first African-American president. But the fundamental problem was a much deeper one that, in retrospect, has come to define US politics in the Obama era and remains the greatest obstacle to liberal progress.
 The primary difference…

The Rising Against the New Boss Editorial October 21, 1875 There is no very great mystery about the power either of Tammany Hall or of the “boss” who for the time being “runs” it, and it is on this account that we can hardly be expected to feel much enthusiasm at the prospect of a rising against the present one. Within the memory of the present generation of men in New York there has always been a “boss,” and at periodical intervals there has been a “rising” against him. Formerly it was Fernando Wood; then it was Tweed; now it is Kelly. Moreover, there are certain facts which tend always to the production of “bosses” in this city. New York is Democratic and very wealthy, and is managed through machinery…

Too Much and Too Little Annie R.M. Logan January 26, 1905 The story contained in The Golden Bowl is elaborately concealed. It is involved, swathed, smothered in many obscurities, obscurities inseparable from the author’s method of presenting an inside and outside and all-round view; obscurities arising from excessive use of extended metaphor, from saying too much and saying too little, even from sentences too complex and too elliptical, too long and too short. To get the story you must pay the price, must attack and overcome the obscurities; and whether this be done in a spirit of happy satisfaction of delight in the obscurities for their own sake, or of irritation, or of mere plodding determination to stick and pull through, in the end you have your reward—a story, a…

January 7, 2015
 I heard news of the killing at about the time the streets of Paris were filling with mourners raising their signs: “Je suis Charlie.” I felt nothing for the dead, and then sorrow that I felt nothing. Certainly, I was not shocked. Unless one is right up in it, mass political killing isn’t shocking anymore; it’s a day job. Take a drone operator: he sits in a trailer in Nevada tracking his prey on a screen, watching the target count out money for bread, talk with his friends (conspirators?), play with his children, make love with his wife, doodle idly, until the moment another drone operator hits the button to release the missile that will tear that faraway man and anyone near him to pieces. None of…

In 1976, when I arrived at The Nation, America was not
booming. The aftermath of the 1960s, the Carter/Reagan years, were an era of bad faith and bad feeling, of low cultural energy, of pessimism on the disintegrating left. In this climate, you would expect the magazine’s arts section to fight the power by becoming the agitprop master of ceremonies for our unpopular front. That did not strike me as a very inviting road to take.
 But I might have had to take it were it not for The Nation’s long tradition of allowing its Books and the Arts section an independence almost unique in journalism—and I think I can say that with some authority, having been around the block in magazineland since then. In its 150-year history, the arts section…

December 28, 1964 The stranded gulch         below Grand Central the gentle purr of cab tires in snow and hidden stars        tears on the windshield torn inexorably away in whining motion and the dark throughts which surround neon in Union Square I see you for a moment red green yellow searchlights cutting through falling flakes, head bent to the wind wet and frowning, melancholy, trying I know perfectly well where you walk to and that we’ll meet in even greater darkness later and will be warm           so our cross of paths will not be just muddy footprints in the morning        not like celestial bodies’ yearly passes, nothing pushes us away from each other        even now I can lean forward across the square and see your surprised grey look become greener…

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 not completely comfortable with my presence as a panelist. Although I’ve been writing for The Nation since 1978—that’s when the then-editor became known as “the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky” for offering me a per-column fee of “something in the high two figures”—there has always been some feeling among longtime subscribers that I am not completely, well, on board. For years, after all, I answered questions about why I wrote for The Nation by saying, “It’s the closest magazine to my house.” In my column, I pointed out that The Nation is published only every other week during the summer months,…

The first item in The Nation
on September 21, 1918, was an apology: “We deeply regret that last week’s issue of The Nation is detained by the Post Office.” The problem was an article attacking the Wilson administration for sending Samuel Gompers to a conference of Labor and Socialist parties meeting in England. Previously, the magazine had opposed the labor leader’s campaign for an eight-hour workday from the right, criticizing his “forbidding” manner and describing him as having a “big head, heavy foreign features, and burly frame.” But now that Villard was turning The Nation to the left, Gompers was too tepid, too hostile to socialism, and too bound to Woodrow Wilson to be a satisfactory voice for America’s workers. 
 Villard, who maintained a pretense of outraged innocence, was secretly…

Dust Changes America Margaret Bourke-White May 22, 1935 Vitamin K they call it—the dust which sifts under the door sills, and stings in the eyes, and seasons every spoonful of food. The dust storms have distinct personalities, rising in formation like rolling clouds, creeping up silently like formless fog, approaching violently like a tornado. Where has it come from? It provides topics of endless speculation. Red, it is the topsoil from Oklahoma; brown, it is the fertile earth of western Kansas; the good grazing land of Texas and New Mexico sweeps by as a murky yellow haze. Or, tracing it locally, “My uncle will be along pretty soon,” they say; “I just saw his farm go by.”
 The storm comes up in a terrifying way. Yellow clouds roll. The wind…

Marilynne Robinson is one of the finest novelists
writing in America today. Her book Housekeeping (1980) received the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Gilead (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, while Home (2008) received the Orange Prize for Fiction. On October 17, 2014, Robinson and the staff of The Nation had a conversation about her work, including her new novel Lila. A full recording can be found at thenation.com/robinson-interview. What follows are edited excerpts.
—John Palattella * * * Politics figures in your novels, but the language of politics does not.
 It’s hard to use modern versions of earlier language with precision. Also, there are words that trigger conditioned response. If you use a certain word, people think they know a great deal about what you mean, so what you want to…

December 10, 1938 Because we love bare hills and stunted trees And were the last to choose the settled ground, Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because So many years companioned by a hound, Our voices carry; and though slumber bound, Some few half wake and half renew their choice, Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name—“hound voice.” The women that I picked spoke sweet and low And yet gave tongue. “Hound Voices” were they all. We picked each other from afar and knew What hour of terror comes to test the soul, And in that terror’s name obeyed the call, And understood, what none have understood, Those images that waken in the blood. Some day we shall get up before the dawn And find our ancient hounds…

We live in an Occupy moment. Inequality has exceeded the extremes of the Gilded Age, while most Americans struggle merely to stay afloat. Leaders in both parties now serve up dueling populist appeals. President Obama calls inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” Jeb Bush echoes that statement, proclaiming that “the opportunity gap is the defining issue of our time.” Even Mitt Romney, before he gave up on another presidential run, decried a country in which “the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in America than ever before.” 
 But extreme inequality has been growing for years—indeed, working people have been losing ground for more than three decades. Moreover, bad times come and go, while poverty has been with us…

In the British Museum in London, amid the mummies and disputed marbles, there is a delicate wooden board around a foot long, inlaid with limestone and lapis lazuli. Its design gives a hint to its purpose: twenty squares, covered in flowers and dots. One of the oldest surviving games in the world, the Royal Game of Ur seems to have been played a lot like modern-day checkers, with competitors racing across the board. It comes from southern Iraq and dates to around 2,600 bce. 
 We know humans have played games for even longer than this: as the Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga put it in 1938, “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them…

If my grandfather were alive today, he’d be about 150 years old. I know what you’re thinking: with my youthful looks, neither the math nor the biology of that sentence makes any sense. But it’s the truth, it’s not worth dissecting, so let’s move on. The Nation, too, is 150 years old. As I am only two generations removed from the Civil War era, and thus able to provide some not-too-distant context, the editors have asked me to write a critique of the magazine on this occasion. I have thought about it and decided that I have no critique to offer. My simple advice: Nation, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t change. Everything’s fine. Thank you for 150 years of telling the truth. Instead of providing the requested critique, I…

How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won Eqbal Ahmad August 30, 1965 History confirms the sovereignty of the human factor in revolutionary warfare. In Vietnam, the signs are clear. The South Vietnamese regime has no legitimacy, and no government backed by a Western power can hope for popular support in a country where the Communists have capitalized on the nationalist appeal of restoring independence and unity. The massacre of civilians began as early as 1960. It has since escalated. The intellectuals and moderates have deserted or defected. And North Vietnam is subjected to daily bombings. America and its South Vietnamese allies have lost the revolutionary war because they could not win the support of the Vietnamese people, and now their moral isolation is total. 
 As an Asian, I…

Bombs and Bulldozers Edward W. Said September 8, 1997 It has taken almost four years for the Oslo peace process to peel off its cosmetic wrappings to reveal the stark truth hidden at its core: There was no peace agreement. Instead, Palestinians entered an appalling spiral of loss and humiliation, gulled by the United States and the media into thinking that we had at last achieved some measure of respectability, bludgeoned by Israel into accepting its pathological definition of security, all of which has impoverished our people, who are obliged to watch more settlements being built, more land taken, more houses destroyed, more sadistic collective punishments meted out. Israel should explain why we should forget the past, remain uncompensated, our travails unacknowledged, even as all other victims of injustice have…

Most forecasts of the future presume that something in the present will continue to grow and increase its power or influence. It’s as simple as doing a math problem on compounding interest or multiplication tables. 
 Orwell did this intentionally in 1984, creating the vision of a postwar Stalinist Britain circa 1948 that was taken to its absurd and appalling conclusion. Less imaginative people, however, genuinely believe that history moves in a straight line. Alarm about the “population bomb” arose from the assumption that women would continue to have babies at the rate they were worldwide in the 1960s. But thanks to reproductive rights and other factors, birthrates have plummeted so dramatically that some nations, from Germany to Japan, are now worried about a steep population decline. 
 Likewise, people…

In a few months, we will be commemorating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta—commemorating, but not celebrating; rather, mourning the blows it has suffered.
 The first authoritative scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone in 1759. It was no easy task. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats”—a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.
 Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters: the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. The former is generally regarded as the foundation of Anglo-American law—in Winston Churchill’s words, referring to its reaffirmation by Parliament in 1628, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” The…

You’d think there was no possible universe in which a very white insurance executive and a very black musical renegade could find anything resembling common ground. And yet the inscrutable mysteries lurking beneath Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” and the kind of anxious, ecstatic energy leaping from saxophonist Albert Ayler’s incantatory composition “Bells” converge at a single line in Stevens’s poem: “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.”
 Let’s pick up this conversation, arbitrarily, in a 1966 interview that Albert and his brother, trumpeter Donald Ayler, are having with Nat Hentoff, who asks how best to listen to the “free jazz” they’re playing. “One way not to,” Don says, “is to focus on the notes and stuff like that. Instead, try to move your imagination toward the…

April 25, 1994 I’ll settle for Immortality— Not thru the body     Not thru the eyes         Star spangled high mountains             waning moon over Aspen peaks; But thru words, thru the breath         of long sentences loves I have, heart beating         still, inspiration continuous, exhalation of         cadenced affection These immortal survive America,            survive the fall of States         Departure of my body,            mouth dumb dust This verse broadcasts desire,             accomplishment of Desire Now and forever boys can read             girls ream, old men cry Old women sigh             youth still come.           7/19/92, Aspen…

As the sun set on the Occupy Seattle encampment in December 2011, the question “What next?” hung in the air, as it did over Zuccotti Park in New York City. The tents were gone, our spirits were dampened, but an awakened sense of empowerment prevailed. The movement had given voice to a widespread fury at big business and a recognition of the gaping class divide. Key to Occupy’s success were the thousands of young people who had helped elect President Obama and had completed their own first steps toward achieving the American Dream, only to see their college degrees translate into crushing student debt and poverty wages. Inside and outside the encampments, discussions about the moral bankruptcy of Wall Street began to evolve into questions about the viability of capitalism…

Imagine a state that compelled its citizens to inform it at all times of where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, who they are talking to, how they spend their time and money, and even what they are interested in. None of us would want to live there. Human-rights groups would condemn such a state for denying the most basic elements of human dignity and freedom. We’d pity its citizens for their inability to enjoy the rights and privileges we know are essential to a liberal democracy.
 In fact, this is the state in which we now live—with one minor wrinkle: the US government does not compel us directly to share any of the above intimate information with it. Instead, it relies on private companies to…

When revolution broke out in St. Petersburg in 1905, Vladimir Lenin, a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, wrote a treatise on “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.” At the same time, in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was organizing within the Social Democratic Party’s tent.
 A decade and change later, when Lenin’s ragged band of Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and won state power, they did so under the banner of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Similarly, when Luxemburg took part in the ill-fated German Revolution, it was as a member of the Communist Party of Germany.
 For Lenin, especially—who remained loyal to the ideas of German Social Democratic Party theorist Karl Kautsky even when Kautsky was no longer loyal to them himself—this change in…

How does a state fail? 
 It’s a question you can’t help asking yourself as you make your way in Haiti, through the chaos left by four severe tropical storms in 2008 and the destruction wrought by the 2010 earthquake—some of which is still evident on the streets of Port-au-Prince today, five years later. It’s not just the unrebuilt infrastructure that raises this question, but also the human and political waste caused by so many years of corrupting collaboration with the United States, the United Nations and outside nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). 
 A state doesn’t fail because of some innate inferiority in its people. I make this obvious point only because people who don’t know Haiti often try, as subtly as they know how, to claim this is the case.…

June 22, 1946 From this hospital bed I can hear an engine breathing—somewhere   in the night: —Soft coal, soft coal,   soft coal! And I know it is men   breathing shoveling, resting— —Go about it the slow way, if you can find any way—           Christ! who's a bastard?      —quit and quit shoveling. A man beathing   and it quiets and the puff of steady work begins        slowly: Chug. Chug. Chug. Chug . . .          fading off. Enough coal at least   for this small job   Soft! Soft! —enough for one small engine, enough for that. A man shoveling, working and not lying here   in this hospital bed—powerless —with the white-throat   calling in the poplars before dawn, his faint flute-call, triple tongued, piercing the shingled curtain of the new leaves;        drowned out by…

April 28, 1910
 Sirs: I do not need to tell you that the reports of my recent address in Pittsburgh have, by piecemeal quotation, conveyed an entirely false impression. You yourself have made allowance for this distortion in your kind editorial of this week. I can only assure you, therefore, that I entirely agree with the views of your editorial. It would be inexcusable for any man responsible for the administration of a university to overlook the value of culture and of all that quiet and deeper development of the mind which displays itself in personal poise, in quiet insight, in the finer forms of intellectual power, rather than in public service and material achievement.
 I beg that you will not believe that because I seem incapable of stating more…

On June 25, 1863, as Confederate forces fought their way north toward Gettysburg, a group of wealthy New Yorkers gathered at the Union League Club on 17th Street to hear a pitch. The speaker, journalist and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, laid out a “dream of an honest weekly paper.” The idea was to aim not for a large circulation, but for a select, influential readership. By the end of the evening, Olmsted had his first thousand dollars. By the end of the week, he had trustees, a fundraising committee and an editor: his friend E.L. Godkin, an Anglo-Irish journalist who had covered the Crimean War and toured the American South (inspired by Olmsted’s own writings). “The thing starts so favorably,” Olmsted wrote to his wife, “I shall go into…

The Execution of the Anarchists Editorial (E.L. Godkin) November 10, 1887 It is now a year and a half since the bomb-throwing in Chicago. During the following six months people’s minds were occupied with the horrors of the resulting slaughter and maiming of the police, about forty of whom were killed or disabled in the discharge of their duty, and with the devilish malignity of the attack on them. At that time nobody—not even, we think, the firmest opponents of capital punishment—ventured to suggest that there was any place in this world for the bomb-throwers, or that the removal from it of such tigers was not a solemn duty to human society.
 Since then, however, a good many people—some of them clergymen, some philanthropists, and some simply soft-headed people who…

From The Nation’s very inception, the idea of freedom has been fundamental to its political outlook. Of course, freedom (along with its twin, liberty) has long occupied a central place in Americans’ political vocabulary. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—its ubiquity, freedom is an idea whose meaning is always contested, always in flux. The Nation’s 150-year history exemplifies how successive generations of reformers and radicals (themselves ever-changing categories) have thought about freedom and how the concept has expanded over time to include more and more Americans and more and more realms of life. Ideas central to The Nation’s understanding of freedom today—economic justice, civil liberties, anti-imperialism, political democracy, racial equality and personal autonomy—are deeply rooted in one or another era of the magazine’s past.
 The Nation was born in July 1865,…

January 30, 1960 I The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. II In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a…

Grace Schulman, the poetry editor of the nation from
1972 to 2006, once remarked that this magazine’s “poems and criticism have been more consistently literary” than political. The “back of the book,” as she called it, constitutes the soul of the magazine: not pushed to the back as a matter of lesser importance (though some certainly see it that way), but “back” as in backing—the fundus or bottom of; supporting, strengthening; the hidden spring. Front of the book: reportage, editorials, the debating of laws and action bolstered by facts and figures. Back of the book: intuitions, counterfactuals, representations that may contradict our self-proclaimed beliefs. It’s an old trope, and damned if it doesn’t shore up the lyrical in favor of its own argument, but there it is: the back of the…

On May 9, 1961, just a few weeks after the CIA-led debacle at the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy met with a group of newspaper editors at the White House to chastise them for exposing government secrets. A New York Times article headlined “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Air-Ground Base,” published three months before the invasion, was a case in point, the president argued. 
 “I noted that the information had previously appeared in The Nation,” Times managing editor Turner Catledge recalled saying to the president in protest. 
 “But it wasn’t news until it appeared in the Times,” Kennedy replied. 
 Of course, The Nation’s November 19, 1960, report on covert preparations to invade Cuba was news. More important, it was an act of…

The legacy of Andrew Kopkind, the celebrated political journalist and associate editor of The Nation, continues in these pages to this day. Margaronis was his first intern and wrote this letter to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.
 Dear Andy,
 It’s a strange habit, writing letters to the dead. But I sat down just now to write something else, and I opened a notebook I was keeping in the depths of the Greek crisis (gloom followed by doom, you would say), and on the first page I found these rather earnest questions:
 “November 3rd: Leafing through The Thirty Years’ Wars, and thinking about political exhaustion and disillusion, and how Andy lived it and recovered from it, and what was lost in the recovery—a kind of engagement? Or just the…

The Faith of a Heretic Roger Nash Baldwin November 9, 1918 I am before you as a deliberate violator of the Draft Act. I am opposed to this and all other wars. I do not believe in the use of physical force as a method of achieving any end, however good. I am fully aware that my position is extreme, that it is shared by comparatively few, and that in the present temper it is regarded either as unwarranted egotism or as feeble-mindedness. I cannot, therefore, let this occasion pass without attempting to explain the foundations on which so extreme a view rests.
 I have had an essentially American upbringing and background. Born in a suburb of Boston, of the stock of the first settlers, I was reared in the…

One World or None Freda Kirchwey August 18, 1945 The bomb that hurried Russia into the Far Eastern war a week ahead of schedule and drove Japan to surrender has accomplished the specific job for which it was created. The suffering, the wholesale slaughter it entailed, have been outweighed by its spectacular success; Allied leaders can rightly claim that the loss of life on both sides would have been many times greater if the atomic bomb had not been used and Japan had gone on fighting. There is no answer to this argument. The danger is that it will encourage those in power to assume that, once accepted as valid, the argument can be applied equally well in the future. If that assumption should be permitted, the chance of saving…

More than once, when i’ve been introduced to someone as the former longtime editor of The Nation, that person has asked me: “Did you found the magazine?” 
 And more than once, I have resisted the temptation to denounce the questioner. 
 I am old (82 last July), but not that old. However, the truth is that when, in the late 1970s, I had the chance to become The Nation’s editor, I said yes largely because of The Nation’s long and noble history.
 Even though I grew up in a home where The Nation (along with The New Republic) arrived weekly, my parents found it hard to understand why I would give up what looked like a promising career at The New York Times (where I worked as an editor…

Thirty-three years ago, Victor Navasky and I crafted an unsigned editorial for a special issue of The Nation devoted to “Myths About the Middle East” [December 5, 1981]. Sadly, it remains prescient: “Israel’s democratic character—and its legitimacy and distinctiveness as a Middle Eastern state—is placed in increasing jeopardy with the passage of each day of military subjugation for 1.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The more ‘successful’ Israel is in introducing a large settler population into the occupied territories, the closer it is to becoming a total garrison state.” We also argued that “messianic Zionism—with its assertion that all Jews are one nation, that the ingathering of the diaspora is the raison d’être of Israel—was an outmoded or unrealizable idea.”
 Our editorial merely prefaced a collection of…

June 14, 1947 The piers are pummeled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend. Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay. Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss,…

March 15, 1947   At night the factories   struggle awake,   wretched uneasy buildings   veined with pipes   attempt their work.   Trying to breathe   the elongated nostrils   haired with spikes   give off such stenches, too. And I shall sell you sell you sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.   On certain floors   certain wonders.   Pale dirty light,   some captured iceberg   being prevented from melting.   See the mechanical moons,   sick, being made   to wax and wane   at somebody’s instigation. And I shall sell you sell you sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.   Lights music of love   work on. The presses   print calendars   I suppose, the…

A conversation on The Nation, race and history at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Eric Foner, Darryl Pinckney, Mychal Denzel Smith, Isabel Wilkerson and Patricia J. Williams. Introduction by Katrina vanden Heuvel Moderated by Khalil Gibran Muhammad Muhammad: Welcome to this very special occasion. I think that it is also fitting to note that this is the eighty-sixth birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’d like to introduce the editor and publisher of The Nation. I consider her a friend.
 Vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Khalil. The Nation was started by a group of abolitionists committed to reporting on, and participating in, this country’s struggles to live up to its founding creed. After the Civil War, the challenge was to summon into existence a new, more…

The Chicago Boys in Chile Orlando Letelier August 28, 1976 It would seem to be a common-sensical sort of observation that economic policies are conditioned by and at the same time modify the social and political situation where they are put into practice. Economic policies, therefore, are introduced in order to alter social structures.
 The necessary connection between economic policy and its sociopolitical setting appears to be absent from many analyses of the current situation in Chile. The violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained “free market” policies that have been enforced by the military junta. This failure to connect has…

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein May 2, 2005 Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration’s doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate “post-conflict” plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction. 
 It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs,…

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…

I cried to Captain Kirk to save me, but he could not hear. I sought the Little Tramp as my companion, but Grumpy Cat hid him from view.
 Cinema is gone—everyone agrees. And yet cinema also abides, if only so that Jean-Luc Godard can go on delivering valedictions to what it used to be. Like the history of which it’s a part, the moving image has not finished its work, nor is it likely to anytime soon. I think it’s just gotten a little too much into itself.
 It’s a disconcerting situation, given that cinema used to be so expansive, with movies surfing over the world on the waves of modernity’s Big Bang. That primordial explosion, which Eric Hobsbawm called the “dual revolution,” sent industrial capitalism and political liberalism bursting…

I love sports, but I hate so much of what sports have become. Playing sports should be an opportunity, especially for children, to exercise, make friends and, heaven forbid, have fun. As for the pro leagues, they have been and always will be a business first and foremost, but they should also be a sweet escape after a tough day—instead of something that makes you feel used and even dirty about enjoying.
 If sports are ever going to be reclaimed, we need to put our John Lennon glasses on and actually start by daring to imagine. We need a new vision of what sports could look like, if they were run on a set of principles that weren’t about vacuuming every last dollar from our pockets.
 So imagine a saner…

December 6, 1952 After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence…

It’s an age-old debate among journalists: which approach to covering the news is superior—the American, with its striving after objectivity and balance, or the European, with its frank embrace of slant and party? Should news organizations seek out all sides of an issue, or should they present the news with an unabashed tilt? By now, it seems clear that the Americans (at their best) have the edge. Newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, for all their shortcomings, offer a rich daily diet of news, from distant wars to local schools; analysis of events and trends; coverage of arts and culture; and opinion from both in-house columnists and outside contributors. Another top paper, the Financial Times, though based in…

September 2, 1961 “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” —Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother The town does not exist except where one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die. It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die: into the rushing beast of the night, sucked…

The mother of all problems in higher education today is high tuition at public colleges and universities, which forces students into decades of debt and makes for-profit schools seem like a plausible alternative. 
 College used to be free at institutions like the University of California and other state schools not that long ago. In 2014, tuition was abolished in, of all places, Tennessee. And in January, Obama asked Congress to fund a plan making two-year community colleges tuition-free. That’s a good start, but we need more. Making four years of college free is not only fair; it’s also politically possible. 
 The University of California provides an example of the problem. In 2014, in-state tuition and fees for undergrads totaled $13,222 for one year. And UC isn’t even the…

Mona in Cairo has three Facebook profiles: a heterosexual male one for her family and school friends, who know her only as “Abdul”; a heterosexual female one, through which she can explore being a woman; and a transgender one, through which she can interact with the online community that she has found of people like her. Mona also discovered a black-market source for estrogen online; however, her changing appearance began to attract hostile responses on the city’s streets, and some of the elders in the gay community prevailed upon her to limit her transgender explorations to her room and her webcam. 
 In a poor Chennai neighborhood, an enterprising transgender woman named Lalitha Yogi has set up the “Mermaid Studio” in her room; people from all over India come here…

December 18, 1943 is an enchanted thing    like the glaze on a katydid-wing       subdivided by sun       till the nettings are legion. Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti; like the apteryx-awl    as a beak, or the kiwi's rain-shawl       of haired feathers, the mind       feeling its way as though blind, walks along with its eyes on the ground. It has memory's ear    that can hear without having to hear.       Like the gyroscope's fall,       truly unequivocal because trued by regnant certainty, it is a power of    strong enchantment. It is like the dove-       neck animated by       sun; it is memory's eye; it's conscientious inconsistency. It tears off the veil, tears    the temptation, the mist…