Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i The Nation

The Sidney Hillman Foundation honored justice correspondent Elie Mystal with the prestigious Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism for his “indispensable legal analysis of the many ways in which the courts fundamentally shape American democracy.” Contributing writer Mohammed Mhawish received the Izzy Award for his “numerous first-hand accounts from the front lines of the conflict [in Gaza], documenting his lived experience, and the dangerous toll it has taken on his people and him personally.” Presented by the Park Center for Independent Media and named for the legendary left-wing journalist—and former Nation Washington editor—I.F. Stone, the award recognizes outstanding achievements in independent media. Nation senior editor Lizzy Ratner’s podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, which takes listeners on a journey through the early days of AIDS, won a Peabody…

WE UNDERSTAND, ALMOST INTUITIVELY, THAT GEOGRAPHY is not an afterthought to politics, but the substrate on which political life is built. The flat, fertile land along the Hudson River enabled large estates and semifeudal tenant farming in the 18th and 19th centuries, which in turn led to hierarchical systems of local government. The stony hills of Vermont, by contrast, discouraged such consolidation and lent themselves to smallholder farming, Congregational churches, and democratic wrangling through town meetings. The geographies themselves didn’t have meaning, but they were not side issues: They created the material conditions that made it easier for certain systems to flourish while others faltered. The same is true for information technology. And yet too often, we treat IT as abstract and neutral, obscuring our ability to see power itself…

STAFF PROTESTS FLECK THE HISTORY OF THIS MAGazine. I recall one especially, a small, unstoried objection in Reagantime that raised a big though unintended question. Two women from the business side, who monitored expenses and regarded editors requesting more than one pencil as profligate, had a complaint. They were tired: of pages dominated by proxy armies, allied tyrants, US-backed atrocities from Sabra and Shatila to the killing fields of Central America and southern Africa, etc. This is The Nation, they said; it should cover the nation. Their wordplay remains provocative. In an imperial state, with force projection everywhere on the earth, what is “the nation”? Surely it’s not merely the people or the country, the land-ofliberty aspirations, or even illusion that inspired the magazine’s name in 1865. One can love…

RAS BARAKA, THE DEMOCRATIC MAYOR OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, who was arrested by federal agents on May 9, is the latest example of the Trump administration’s metastasizing authoritarianism. Baraka was arrested outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, and charged with misdemeanor federal trespassing. Alina Habba, a counselor to President Trump and the interim US attorney for New Jersey, said that Baraka had “willingly chosen to disregard the law” and “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center.” Baraka spoke with The Nation on May 11, two days after his release, repudiating Habba’s characterization of the events and clarifying that he was not at the facility to protest. “I came down there to attend a press conference,” Baraka said. “The dispute…

LET’S BE FRANK: IT’S A SOMEWHAT PRESUMPtuous name for a magazine. Adopting it may have been akin to what philosophers refer to as a “speech act,” meant to call into being the very thing referred to. Largely absent from pre–Civil War political rhetoric, which more often spoke of “the union” or “the republic,” the word nation appeared five times in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Two years later, when the first issue rolled off the presses in July 1865, the Confederacy had been defeated and Lincoln murdered, and a fierce fight over whether the “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would indeed see “a new birth of freedom” was just beginning. The Nation was founded to see that struggle through—and we…

When the Arizona Senate’s Government Committee met in February to consider a bill mandating that cities and counties assist with ICE raids, state Senator Jake Hoffman (who is also a member of the Republican National Committee) took the opportunity to ham it up for the cameras, ranting about how “mass deportations are wildly popular with people who are in every party. ”If Hoffman sounded like he was auditioning for a job in the Trump White House instead of governing, he was only joining a troupe of lawmakers who are exploiting the well-known “C-SPAN effect” that has now arrived at Arizona Capitol Television: the propensity for legislative discourse to become more combative and emotional when it’s conducted in front of the cameras. Say this for times of disunion: They create entertaining…

A couple months ago, I watched a local newscast about efforts to revive and disperse the population of Colorado’s state animal, the bighorn sheep. The Department of Parks and Wildlife lured the bighorns near Colorado Springs with tasty treats, dropped a net on them, and took them to a distant plot of land. The video was upsetting. It showed the hapless bighorns freaking out in the net before being wrestled to the ground and loaded into trucks for the trip to a former burn scar west of Pueblo that’s now grassland. But when the sheep got to their new home, I have to admit, they looked pretty darn happy. Virtually all Indigenous peoples in North America were torn from our cultures and from one another. Still, the video left me…

Floridians who have been paying attention predicted the current coup that’s taking place in Washington, DC. After all, we in the Sunshine State have been slowly crushed under similar authoritarian forces for years. Ron DeSantis is only the most recent of Florida’s leaders who have been proudly and loudly hostile to their own citizens, eliminating DEI programs, choking out public education, and waging wars on books and people’s uteruses and the LGBT community and the environment. DeSantis has maniacal dreams of developing our super-fragile protected ecosystems into golf courses and hotels—of all the idiotic things to sacrifice the manatees to. I live in Gainesville, in the north-central part of the state, home to the University of Florida, and for years the school has been shedding brilliant academics who couldn’t bear…

In every state being steamrolled by the billionaire-driven voucher agenda, we must protect the integrity of our public schools. Earlier this year, for the first time in state history, Idaho lawmakers enacted a school voucher law that siphons funding from public schools in order to subsidize private school tuition. It was a tragic moment for the state’s public school system and an even worse moment for the state’s democracy. House Bill 93—Idaho’s tax-credit-based voucher scheme—was overwhelmingly opposed by the public. In the first hearing on the bill, hundreds of Idahoans submitted testimony; citizens against the bill outnumbered those in support by a 10-to-1 margin. The pattern continued after the bill arrived on Governor Brad Little’s desk. Before signing it into law, Little received tens of thousands of calls and e-mails,…

The evergreen question of “How shall I live?” can feel immobilizing amid the calculated chaos of a despotic regime. So, too, can the unsatisfying mundanity of the only authentic answer: One moment at a time. When the aperture on living gets too big, my instinct is to escape. Drugs and booze were great for that, allowing me to hover in blissful repose above my life’s unmanageability. But in recovery, I’ve lost my privileges to such luxurious flight. What I have now is the ability to shrink my aperture. What I want is to arrest global fascism in its tracks and melt down every gun and instrument of war. But first: I will finish typing this sentence. If even that feels like too much, I can breathe in, then breathe out.…

When people in the United States talk about disunion, they often refer to the Civil War, instinctively pitting the South against the rest of the country. The backward South, the story goes, is still fighting the “War of Northern Aggression.” It is the reservoir of all the nation’s racism. I see some truth to this. Born in Boston and raised partly in South Carolina, I currently live in Republican-dominated Louisiana, where I can’t get a legal abortion and union membership ranks 44th in the nation. But I also live in New Orleans, where 80 percent of voters backed a workers’ bill of rights in the 2024 election, where union nurses have struck three times for a decent contract in recent months, and where a Palestine-themed Mardi Gras parade has rolled…

Massachusetts and South Carolina have a troubled history. Before the Civil War, Massachusetts was probably the most vociferously anti-slavery state, and South Carolina probably the most ardently pro-slavery. John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most implacable and articulate defender, was a South Carolinian; the best-known abolitionist journal, William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, was published in Boston. Massachusetts insisted on tariffs to protect its manufacturers; South Carolina bitterly resented the effect of those tariffs on its agricultural exports. On May 20, 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivered a scorching anti-slavery speech that contained particularly harsh criticism of South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler. Two days later, Butler’s younger cousin, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, approached the elderly Sumner in the chamber and beat him senseless with a cane. Sumner was severely injured and was…

In the late 1990s, a group of anti-poverty activists in Idaho told me that one of their most compelling arguments was to tell legislators that their state was in danger of becoming Mississippi. Nobody wanted that. Mississippi tends to hover at or near the bottom of every quality-of-life ranking. The state continues to embrace its particularly brutal history of chattel slavery and Jim Crow rule. For liberals, Mississippi presents a troubling exception to the story of a kind and fair America, the same story that makes it difficult to comprehend Trumpism. This is not “supposed” to happen in America, only in places like Mississippi—the backward, anachronistic outlier that no state wants to become. However, as with any stereotype, the real story is more complicated. The truth is that Mississippi has…

When students are shielded from entire chapters of the American journey, they inherit divisions before they can even understand them. The nonpartisan spirit that once set Nebraska apart appears to be fading, swallowed by the ooze of hyper-partisanship that is now seeping through the marble halls of our nation’s only unicameral legislature. What was once a chamber of neighborly debate now echoes with the talking points of national operatives. State senators find themselves under pressure from beyond our borders—urged to rewrite our electoral process, not for Nebraska’s sake but to tip the scales in favor of one man’s return to the White House. Since 1992, Nebraska has split its Electoral College votes, a quirk it shares with only one other state (Maine). Each of our three districts awards a single…

These disunited United States? Here in my securely blue state of New Jersey, surrounded by states—or parts of states, in the case of Pennsylvania—also securely blue, my first thought is: “No disunity here!” My second thought is that New Jersey is so diverse, with the largest proportion of foreign-born residents except for California, that such a varied populace surely means disunion. But, no, demographic diversity does not disunite New Jerseyans. What does it is geography. A little over a decade ago, Rutgers graduate Joe Steinfeld labeled a map of my state, with plain-speaking cruelty, from north to south as follows: “Well-to-Do Conservatives”; “The Melting Pot” (where I live); “Poor Minorities”; “Russians, Polacks, and Toxic Fumes”; “Jews”; “Lawyers Driving Hybrids”; “Old People and Asians”; “Italian Guys in Wife Beaters”; “Pretty Much…

North Dakota has often been a testing ground for the country’s worst practices and ideas, from the radioactive river water caused by oil and chemical spills to the creation of a reservation system for controlling Native peoples. This should make it ground zero for writers—if only we could produce them. At cocktail parties, I’ll often ask well-read guests to name a North Dakota writer—just one, any one. An awkward silence will sweep the room as ice rattles against glass, or someone swirls their red wine before taking a swig. North Dakota? Who even thinks about North Dakota? And it’s true: For most of my life, even close out-of-state friends can’t remember where I’m from, saying “South Dakota”—or, worse, lumping the region into some vanilla-flavored mass and, hedging their bets, saying…

Sheila said It’s not news, if he’s not dead Cornelius said A woman is not a slave amen to all of that even if I’m still sad that Marie Antoinette didn’t really say Let them eat cake was actually speaking of brioche which is bread not the same thing especially to Americans since brioche is sweet but free of frosting and roses and explosions of sprinkles and funfetti not as fun as America where everybody’s ready to eat cake at the drop of a hat where cake is the answer no matter what the question is on the internet it says Jean Jacques Rousseau penned that quote about brioche making this bit of history the fakest of fake news back when revolution was also an excuse for mass cruelty and words…

Hydrogen peroxide is my mama’s secret for getting out old blood. Douse the spot liberally, she says, then leave it alone. The chemical bubbles along, picking up the plasma and platelets. Cool water will wash it all away. Here in Tennessee, though, not all bloodstains are to be removed. When I was a child, I envied a friend who lived in a house with bloodstained floors. She told me how, during the Civil War, her ancestors had graciously allowed the Confederate medical corps to use the building as a field hospital. As surgeons hacked off limbs, the blood pooled on the wooden planks. Since the boards were finished with only a skim of linseed oil or beeswax, the fluids soaked into the grain. Hers was one of the many…

On March 3, around 100 residents of my small mountain town crammed into the community house for a town meeting, Vermont’s annual exercise in participatory democracy. After a convivial potluck, a volunteer moderator steered the discussion of the action items posted in the town report that we’d all dutifully brought with us. Did we, for example, want to spend $6,000 on the upkeep of our four local cemeteries? Did we agree that property taxes will be due on November 1? Did we agree to allocate $44,950 to our fire department? It was a fairly routine meeting, with little debate and the “ayes” dominating, until we came to Article 5 on the agenda: “Would the town vote the sum of $25,000 to establish a capital fund for long-term or larger infrastructure…

West Virginia is generally considered behind the times, stuck in the past. But in truth, we were the future. We’re the harbinger and vanguard, the dress rehearsal and training ground. Our government was designed from its inception to serve capitalism. The oft-repeated narrative about West Virginia being created to protest slavery and the Confederacy is only partly true. A handful of Wheeling industrialists and merchants—one might say an oligarchy—wrested us out of Virginia in the 1860s to serve their own interests, and few states have suffered the scale of resource exploitation that followed. The violent and still-ongoing extraction of coal, oil, gas, and lumber. The profits vacuumed out to benefit other states. The century of poverty left behind. The ripped and leveled earth, the poisoned water. We’re also ahead of…

YASMINE TAEB LIVES IN THE GREAT EXPANSE OF SUBURBAN COUNTIES that spreads out to the south and west of Washington, DC, to form NoVA, the most populous region of Virginia. NoVA (short for “Northern Virginia”) is where counties and cities are named for the dukes and earls of colonial times—Prince William, Fairfax, Culpepper. It’s where the plantations of founding fathers and presidents are now tourist sites and where Civil War battlefields remind us of the bloody fight to address the original sin of the founders’ “American experiment.” But NoVA’s contemporary political reality is shaped less by its heritage than by the fact that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of federal government employees in the United States. And it’s these people that Taeb, a veteran progressive activist…

ON THE LAST DAY OF FEBRUARY IN 1954, JAMES SCHUYLER looked out his window and wrote a poem. he was living with his friend frank o’hara, and from their tenement apartment on east 49th street they had a view of the united nations headquarters, constructed only a few years earlier. in his poem “february,” schuyler alluded to the un building in passing, but his gaze gravitated to more mundane details: “a chimney, breathing a little smoke”; “the boxy trucks roll[ing] up Second Avenue/into the sky”; “a woman who just came to her window/and stands there filling it/jogging her baby in her arms.” “I can’t get over/how it all works in together,” Schuyler marveled, astonished by the casual, random splendor of this scene. The last line of the poem, now also…

Evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy.Genes want survival: sex and cake. Nothing survives without food,said the Buddha. You are hungry for the story you already believe.You’ve already waited for God, in his Judge Judy robe,to tell everyone you were right. And maybe you were right. Butyou already know how that thought goes, how it ends. That storydoesn’t care about your pain. Stay with her.Your pain, I mean. Your pain is in pain. She is anthropomorphizingherself. She has nothing to eat but story, and nowhere to rest.Stay in the room. Offer her the couch for as long as she needs. You are learning how to listento her terrible wailing, how to hear wailing, though she will want to make it because.How to hold her. How to listen without telling herher story,…

Would that I were a prophet or a secretary,that at last my unlived experience might be applicable to the problem of endings.As opposed to my suboptimal hermitage, which never has to my knowledge inspireda single algorithm, natural or otherwise. Still, I hear no endin my head. Would that I were a balladengaged in a theory of diminishingreturns, wherein paradise, like time, could finally remainlost as the tungsten rings we once wore to discourageunwanted advances. Thirty-seven per cent of the time, I don’t apply.Yet the letters keep rolling in, thanking me for sharing my promising work.My work being to stare forever at the elevator I can’t board—because, for all those numbers narrating the sublimedependability of counterweights and cables,which for centuries have softly conveyed our bestefforts to corner offices, I can never…

IN A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO STRAIGHT OUT OF DYSTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION, a brain-dead woman in Georgia has been forced to serve as a human incubator for over 100 days, in what amounts to the state-sponsored desecration of a deceased person. Yet this horrific situation isn’t fiction; it actually exists, in a state with one of the most draconian abortion bans in the nation. Indeed, it is because of Georgia’s abortion ban that hospital officials have taken control of Adriana Smith’s deceased body, acting without any regard for her grieving mother’s wishes. Sadly, Adriana’s case reflects the new “Jane Crow” era, when the state in which a woman resides, becomes pregnant, and dies now determines whether she will be accorded basic civil and human rights. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned…

THE GOP’S SO-CALLED BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL, PASSED by the House in May, comes with an ugly surprise: It would force poor people into work in order to prove that they are worthy of life’s basic necessities. House Republicans, to help pay for their main goals—giving the wealthy even more tax breaks and ramping up the Trump administration’s brutal anti-immigrant regime—not only plan to force all states to institute work requirements in their Medicaid plans, but will also allow them to impose the harshest such rules ever. Their bill orders nearly all childless adults without disabilities to certify that they were working, volunteering, or going to school in the month before enrollment. But states could require people to show they’ve been working for as much as a year before they can…

DONALD TRUMP AND HIS MOVEMENT MIGHT SEEM like the quintessential example of backwardlooking politics. Their motto, after all, is “Make America Great Again.” Precisely when it was great isn’t exactly clear; sometime in the past, before all those minorities got so uppity (or became majorities), when women knew their place and America built things. Nostalgia seems to animate Trump’s mind. Was it merely a coincidence that Escape From Alcatraz was on TV the night before he tweeted about reopening that doleful island for business? Trump knows what he’s doing, saying it’s “a sad symbol, but it’s a symbol of law and order.” If he could make John Wayne head of the Department of Homeland Security, he would. Trump himself is another “sad symbol”—of chintzy 1980s glamour that the swells believed…

Yes! SANFORD LEVINSON I AM A LAWYER AND A POLITICAL SCIENTIST. Were I to answer this question solely as a lawyer, I would easily say yes. The United States was (or were?) born as a secessionist movement from the British Empire. It was not a “revolution” as we understand the word today. George Washington and his armies had no designs on London; those we call “patriots” simply wanted to withdraw from the existing framework of governance. Taking a cue from the founding of the United States, blue states can legally secede from the Union. Perhaps the most audacious phrase in the Declaration of Independence occurs in the first sentence, when it purports to speak in the name of “one people.” Any historian—and, one suspects, most of those in Philadelphia gathered…

in alabama, i learned the truth of human duality and i learned the truth of human tenderness. i learned that the river’s current is a currency we share but often abuse—think of the old iron bridge at the cahaba—there, above the waters which make us the most biodiverse, waters which literally make space for every little organism to live, eat, make babies, and die in nature’s way—there, men of the stars and bars planned to plant bombs, corrupt seeds in the belly of a church in birmingham. faced with so much wonder, the flow of the river filling their ears with the most raucous and peacemaking sound, how did their minds see anything like hate? what flag makes the shape of this particular paradox? the very first time the american…

Teachers whisper about some students, weary from the night shift, who sleep through class. Walk the land in rural towns like Green Forest, Arkansas, down dirt roads among clusters of homes, and you will hear Spanish, Marshallese, Vietnamese, Laotian. A woman from Guatemala will tell you that rent is $300 a month as she sits on a sagging couch in a town of nearly 3,000, where almost half that many people work at Tyson’s processing plant. The children arrived as unaccompanied minors. The children speak Indigenous languages. The children speak Spanish. Teachers whisper about some students, weary from the night shift, who sleep through class. Eventually, many disappear from school, their lives given over to the night shift. These kids live in the shadows, afraid and silent. But if you…

For the past 25 years, we have been divided in an alternating pattern of roughly 51 percent majorities, and the same mistake is made by each successive winner: Go all the way with your program while you can—implement now, explain later. What the winners have forgotten is that you cannot govern for long without the consent of the 49 percent. Democratic lawmakers for the time being are stunned, scattered, and immobilized, in a region between bewilderment and dismay. The more serious among Republican lawmakers have shown themselves docile in obedience to the edicts of a president who is acting more like a dictator than most people, even in his own party, seem to have thought possible. But the serial enormities of Donald Trump’s first 75 days form a pattern that…

Nowhere does the current state of disunion seem more evident than in Georgia, home to the widely protested Cop City, a $120 million–plus police militarization center. Years of sustained opposition had worked to block its construction in a Metro Atlanta–area forest: Land defenders lived in the trees they hoped to save; protesters destroyed machines that were to be used to raze the forest; a coalition tried to block construction through a democratic referendum. The state’s response was swift and harsh. It brought a sweeping RICO prosecution against 61 people, criminalizing acts of mutual aid and labeling protest as terrorism. A forest defender was killed by police, shot 14 times in their tent. Millions of dollars were wasted, the referendum was mired in an appeals court, and acres of forest were…

In retrospect, driving with my 12-year-old daughter from our home near Chicago to an empty cornfield in southern Illinois to see the 2017 total solar eclipse, I should’ve been a little more alarmed by the number of Confederate flags we counted along the way. Four years later, when the pandemic seemed to have eased and we wanted to just go somewhere, anywhere, a day trip through central Illinois took us past not only more Stars and Bars but also “Trump 2024” placards and Trump-as-Rambo banners flapping over apartment balconies, as well as “Piss on Pritzker” lawn signs—all of which seemed a little overdone, given how laughably Trump had emceed the pandemic. (Also nasty, since I’d thought Governor JB Pritzker’s daily briefings were a heartwarmingly awkward spectacle of human anxiety and…

A little more than 20 years ago, I wrote and directed C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, a film that told an alternate history in which the South had won the Civil War and shaped the country in its own image. Making the film alerted me to how Confederate ideology continues to influence American society. Although the South lost the Civil War, it was not until the 1960s that substantial changes occurred in Southern society. Ever since, the United States has been divided between those who accept the results—the enshrinement of equality in the Constitution—and those who don’t. Call them the USA and the CSA. Recently, the two countries have merged into one: The Confederacy has gobbled up the Union. Lawrence, Kansas, where I live, was, like The Nation, founded…

These days, political differences often come down to how you feel about destroying nature for the sake of profit. The gamut runs from can’t-hurt-a-bug bleeding hearts to kill-for-fun, drill-baby-drill psychopaths. Most of us fall somewhere in between. We have to live, after all. When it comes to conservation, our nation is increasingly divided between two opposing views: the belief that the web of life is sacred and interconnected and must be protected for the good of us all, and the belief that unchecked, unregulated growth is a red-blooded American birthright and that anyone who threatens it is an impediment to progress. Here in Maine, no enterprise is more symbolic than the lobster industry. The lobsterman is our cultural icon: the hardworking man who chugs out in a boat at dawn…

This country was built on the violent foundation of “separate but equal,” and in many towns we may love, this is perpetuated still. In times of groundlessness, I come back to the water. In Michigan, it can’t be helped. My native state is split across two peninsulas stitched together by a five-mile-long suspension bridge and bordered by four of the largest lakes in the world. I’m the type that boasts to oceanside friends of the majesty of the Great Lakes: their frigid depths; their thousands of miles of shoreline; their store of nearly all the fresh water in the United States. Poured over the lower 48 states, it would settle at a depth of more than nine feet. Even well beyond this inland coast, Michigan’s abundance of lakes, streams, and…

Missouri invented the American Dream. Hannibal’s Mark Twain wrote the Great American Novel; Marceline inspired Walt Disney to conceive his animated adventures; in St. Louis, Chuck Berry created rock and roll. Missouri showed America the hamburger and the hot dog and the ice cream cone at the 1904 World’s Fair, held when St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the United States. Missouri is not North or South, not East or West. It is simply American. Missouri destroyed the American Dream. Born from a bad bargain—Missouri was admitted as a slave state in 1821, balanced out by free Maine—it was promptly plunged into violence. In the east, enslaved Black people crossed the Mississippi River to escape white mobs. In the south, Native Americans died walking the Trail of Tears. In…

There’s an eerie silence squatting in the rural valleys of Nevada, a dead, smothered pause mistaken for peace. In 1922, Anne Martin, a Nevada suffragist who was the first woman to run for the US Senate, wrote in these pages, “She [Nevada] is the despair not only of reformers but of case-hardened lawyers, who must be agile indeed to keep pace with the rapid and contradictory changes in laws made every two years by servile legislatures, at the command of the selfish interests which elected them.” You can’t make sense of Nevada’s place in the union, Martin suggests, without acknowledging the contradiction always lurking in the background in this country. Throughout its history, something more compelling than morals has had to rule in Nevada: a desperate hope to escape America’s…

In the decades since the New Deal, New York’s upstate tail has too often wagged the urban dog.' The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth.—Vincent McHugh, “The Metropolis and Her Children” To the citizen of the metropolis, New York State is an abomination and an imposition, a mere collection of geographical facts—capital: Albany; population: 19.9 million; highest peak: Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks; notable attraction: Niagara Falls. Somehow, through various flukes of history (not least the fact that during most of the Revolutionary War, New York City was occupied by the British), the state’s vast hinterland came to politically dominate the more populous, prosperous urban south. At times, it was almost possible to view this subordination as a…

A modest proposal: I believe the time has come to create, by act of Congress, a hereditary nobility in the United States. The United States has, in this millennium, vindicated the predictions of Marx and Tocqueville that under capitalist conditions, the ideal of equality inevitably decays into the pseudo-egalitarianism of the marketplace and culture is leveled down to the lowest common denominator. The equality of all persons irresistibly morphs into the equality of all consumer preferences, and gone is the idea that there’s anything higher to aspire to than our money-grubbing days and TikTok-scrolling nights. To address this problem, I propose a political and social intervention, modest in scale, that might provide a gentle corrective to market egalitarianism. It will, at the very least, encourage us to elevate our gaze…

The ocean is rising faster on South Carolina’s low-lying coast than almost anywhere else between Canada and Mexico. The low-lying coast of South Carolina—all 187 miles of it, the home to 1.4 million people—may be a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide. Satellite imagery shows that the ocean is rising faster and the ground is sinking more rapidly there than almost anywhere else between Canada and Mexico, a combined change of roughly one inch a year that may be accelerating. Nancy Mace, the member of Congress who represents the region, is determined to keep balls out of the women’s stalls on Capitol Hill, as she put it during her campaign against transgender people earlier this year. Mace’s district had been competitive before 2020; then the Legislature packed much…

Among Utah’s publicly owned landscapes are river sculpted canyons of Navajo sandstone and strands of quaking aspen. Twenty-two years ago, in the thick of the W. Bush years, Molly Ivins warned in these pages: “The whole damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate).” At the same time, Ivins defended her home state: its enigmatic vastness and dizzying diversity, its strangeness and beauty. “It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else,” she wrote. Eighty years earlier, another Nation contributor took a crack at defining Texas. George Clifton Edwards, a Socialist attorney from Dallas, heaped scorn on the state’s anti-intellectualism, its violent disposition, and the hotbed of KKK activity that was his hometown. Then, like Ivins, Edwards defended his native state.…

The founders had no idea the country they created would turn out so rich, so powerful, and yet so morally weak and economically fragile. Here in Virginia, the founders always surround us. Thomas Jefferson’s home looms over the University of Virginia, where I work. My office sits on land that once was James Monroe’s plantation, where enslaved people toiled to build his wealth. James Madison’s estate is a short drive away, and George Washington’s plantation remains one of the state’s top tourist destinations. More than Massachusetts, where the Revolutionary War began, Virginia, where the war ended and the Constitution began on Madison’s desk, can rightly claim to have started the whole story of continental conquest and the slow march toward democracy. The United States as a global power ruled by…

Growing up in Wyoming, you learn that the state has two nicknames: the Cowboy State and the Equality State. But now equality is one of the words that the Trump administration has ordered to be struck from government websites and materials. Wyoming was one of the first states to give women the right to vote, the first with women bailiffs, jurors, and even a woman governor. We are not that state anymore. Wyoming has one of the largest gender wage gaps in the country, low representation of women in state government, and low family-planning and college graduation rates. Instead of equality, the state leans into cowboys. Everywhere you go in Wyoming, there’s a silhouette of Steamboat, the bucking horse with a rider on top. The University of Wyoming’s mascot is…

“FREE FROM WHAT?” FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE has his counterprophet ask rhetorically. He isn’t interested in the answer. “What does it matter to Zarathustra! Your fiery eyes should tell me: free The distinguished British historian Quentin Skinner, now in his 80s, has spent the latter half of his career insisting that we have suffered a grievous loss over the past few centuries of politics and philosophy in the West: the loss of a republican vision of freedom from domination, as opposed to the more modern and libertarian notion of freedom from interference that prevails today. And yet, much like the townspeople in Nietzsche’s, philosophical fable, Skinner has never shown much interest in what freedom is for. One of our leading historians of ideas, Skinner has written works of intellectual history that are…

she signed each letter. I carried them with me,never imagining one day she would be never,be dream, be archive, be Ziploc full of ashin a Styrofoam urn. Careful, she carried so little:the mother who left her, the stepmotherwho kept her, a cardigan bright as a cardinal,nearly four years in a prison camp fenced by pineswhose ragged canopies tore at the sky.From her I learned to scull diagonallyacross precarious water, to write longhanda handful of words—mizu, obāsan, sumimasen—an artful way to arrange carnations in a glass.Have I been careless with the past? How can we caretakewhat remains? A closet stockpiled with sardines.Silver coins squirreled in drawers. A picture of herat New Year’s looking both delighted and sad.For her, to care was to never be a bother.To cake concealer over jaundice. To…

ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN HONG KONG, NOT LONG BEFORE the moment in 1997 when Great Britain handed its former colony back to China, I went for a run around the Peak, a towering hill that provides some much-needed green space in an unbelievably dense city. Afterward, I meandered down toward the Star Ferry dock in Victoria Harbour and was startled by an eerie, unidentifiable sound. It was loud and high-pitched, like an enormous flock of birds. The sound kept getting louder as I approached the HSBC building, a landmark office tower, completed in 1986, that was famous among the architectural cognoscenti for appearing to be made from an entirely different kit of parts than most buildings of the period. The HSBC building was neither a smooth glass box nor an…

THOUGH THE CITY OF NEW YORK HAS BEEN OPERATing under that name since 1664, it has been electing mayors only since 1834. Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence, the winner of that first election, was a Democrat; so was Robert Anderson Van Wyck, the first man elected by voters in all five boroughs. So were most of the others, though the greatest man (regrettably, so far they have all been men) to hold the office was undoubtedly Fiorello La Guardia, who during his long career in national and municipal politics ran on the Socialist, Republican, and Fusion party lines. La Guardia’s example reminds us that this is an office that, in the right hands, can achieve remarkable progress—a fact easily forgotten in our present diminished circumstances. A historian would have to reach…

ON AN OTHERWISE UNREMARKABLE SPRING DAY, the Trump administration’s lawless assault on the rights of immigrants was interrupted by a government-chartered plane landing at Dulles International Airport. In a revealing reverse-image set piece, some 50 white Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa had arrived, in pursuit of an array of generous resettlement provisions. In February, Trump had signed an executive order granting them streamlined refugee status and a smooth path to US citizenship. The newcomers were feted with welcoming statements from the president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and scores of MAGA-aligned commentators and pundits. The same day that the Afrikaner “refugees” were getting the red-carpet treatment, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was ending temporary protected status for immigrants from Afghanistan—many of whom had assisted the US war…

57 Number of children in Gaza who died from malnutrition between March 2, when Israel imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid to the region, and May 12, according to the Ministry of Health 1 in 5 Proportion of people in Gaza facing starvation 31 Number of people massacred by Israeli forces while seeking aid at a distribution site in Gaza on June 2 17K Number of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers in Gaza at risk of acute malnutrition over the next 12 months 40 Number of days in May and June that 600 people organized by Veterans for Peace are fasting to demand that humanitarian aid resume in Gaza and that the US stop arming Israel…

The Radical Self Re “Trauma’s New Look,” by Jess McAllen [May 2025]: One of McAllen’s central critiques of internal family systems therapy is the lack of research behind it. It’s important to note that cognitive behavioral therapy, now widely accepted as an evidence-based treatment, took 20 to 30 years to develop a robust track record of empirical support. And CBT had significant structural advantages: It was developed within academic institutions, supported by large research grants and teams of graduate students. IFS, by contrast, evolved slowly and organically, often refined in informal settings like living rooms throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as early practitioners iteratively improved the model. Only in recent years has gained the visibility and resources necessary to sponsor formal research. The early results of these studies have been…

Greenlanders weighing President Trump’s annexation offer might want to consider the present state of America’s existing resource colony, Alaska, as it struggles with flatlined budgets, crumbling schools, and an exodus of workers and young families.We thought we were prepared for this inevitable period of decline in oil production. In 1976, after the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, the state created a permanent fund to invest some of the windfall for future generations. Annual dividends paid to all residents profoundly reduced income inequality. Today, the Alaska Permanent Fund has grown to some $80 billion, and the earnings help pay for the government in a state with no income tax. But the fund doesn’t provide nearly enough revenue for both the state budget and the dividends, which remain popular across the…

“Our culture is our superpower.” That’s what my friend, the Cook Island artist and voyager Numangatini Mackenzie, told me before the lights went down for the world premiere of Shrek translated into Te Reo Māori, the first language of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Kids bustled around the gymnasium, which had been converted into a theater for Māoriland, an Indigenous film festival held northwest of Wellington, New Zealand. All around, the hum of Māori, with their tattooed arms and faces, their long hair and high buns, and their bodies adorned in bone, shell, and greenstone, speaking that percussive, vowel-strewn Eastern Polynesian tongue, te reo, or “the language.” To me, this feels like a dream. I spent the last year and a half promoting my film Sugarcane, which documents the atrocities and intergenerational…

Since the 2024 presidential election, I have bought no bread. It’s not a fast. Not grief. Not “some weird penance,” as a friend described her failure to sing in the shower since Election Day. It’s a freedom. “Mother Delilah,” as I named my sourdough starter, is soothingly predictable: She behaves just as the baker Bryan Ford said she would in his book New World Sour dough. She’s ritual, a prayer. Since November: sourdough boules, bagels, waffles, English muffins. Sometimes two baking days a week. We make music, poems, syllabi, Facetime calls, gardens, love. We make meals for loved ones. The youngest member of this household dances and does his own laundry. As I stretch the fabulous mass in my hands, turn the bowl a quarter, stretch and turn again, I…

For reasons that are both historical and intensely contemporary, Hawai‘i feels increasingly out of place in a discussion of the 50 federated states. First, consider its separate history. Settled by Polynesians between one and two millennia ago, its disparate islands were slowly united into a complex chiefdom, while enduring a demographic cataclysm on contact with the West. Penetrated by Christian missionaries in the early 19th century, Hawai‘i evolved into a constitutional monarchy. Beleaguered by the seagoing imperialisms of Britain, France, and Russia, it was taken over step-by-step by the United States. Retooled into an armed fortress, Hawai‘i became the target of the attack that clinched the United States’ participation in World War II, during which it was placed under martial law. In the aftermath, a radical union movement and the…

In the national imagination, Indiana is a place of comedy and horror. The lovable oddballs of Parks and Recreation make their home here, as do the children of Stranger Things, whose small town is menaced by an alien intelligence. This makes sense, as Indiana is closely associated with home: the exasperating home you ran away from, the vulnerable home you want to protect. It flickers in the heartland, where candlelight gleams through the sycamores. Snow is falling on the first day of spring in the town where I was born. I walk with my head down, plowing into the wind, the Indiana stride. Sour joy at the toughness it takes. Other people have placid weather; they’re spoiled, shiftless—they wouldn’t last two weeks in this cold and cloudy dark. In her…

In the wake of disasters, one finds efforts toward mutual aid and communal solidarity, knitting together new social bonds. On the morning of September 7, 2024, Joseph Allen Couch, a former Army Reserve engineer, walked into a gun store in London, Kentucky, and purchased a semiautomatic Cobalt AR-15 with a mounted sight and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He then took position on a cliff ledge overlooking Interstate 75 and proceeded to spray live rounds into cars passing on the highway, injuring five people. Afterward, Couch disappeared into the surrounding woods and turned the gun on himself, while the state shut down its schools for days in the belief that the shooter was still on the loose. How did Kentucky come to be the font of such despair and the scene…

For me, as for many, the ultimate question is whether the United States will become an autocracy or remain a nation of laws. In the latter case, the object of the game is to discover and enact what citizens actually want; to that end, laws are created by the national legislature, implemented by the executive, and tested by the courts with reference to the US Constitution, a document that has been revised from time to time, usually for the better. The risk now is that, for the first time in our history, it may be disregarded—or even jettisoned altogether. That would make the United States one of the most dangerous autocracies in the world, alongside Russia and China. Since 2016, most legislators on the right have cravenly capitulated to executive…

My homelands, my Ojibwe tribal homelands, are an intimate place, somewhat devoid of grandeur, but to me and my kin indescribably beautiful. These homelands are studded with lakes. Some, like Lake Superior, Lake Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and Red Lake, are so vast they can’t be seen across. Others, mere dips in the land, are so small they have no name at all. But all remind me of Joseph Conrad’s description of the ocean, which “seemed to pretend there was nothing the matter with the world.” But, of course, there was. And here in the western Great Lakes region, there is: the series of treaties we, the Dakota, and other tribes signed with the US government between 1805 and 1867, which resulted in the state of Minnesota imposing its sovereignty…

“Imheartsick,” Marc Racicot told me after “I’m he returned from a 560-mile trip to address the town hall meetings held by Indivisible in Bozeman and Billings. “Heartsick that we’ve come to this point in the country. And, of course, we could see it coming, which makes it more difficult.” This confession leads to an important question for those who wish to remedy American disunion: How long should we have seen it coming? A former Montana attorney general (1989–93) and governor (1993–2001), Racicot was a “close friend” and powerful surrogate for George W. Bush after the contested 2000 election. His reassuring voice, an echo of Bing Crosby’s, informed C-SPAN viewers that there was something “terribly wrong” with the manual recounts in Democratic-leaning Florida counties. A talented prosecutor, Racicot became chairman of…

New Hampshire clings to Mount Monadnock, the mountain in its southwestern corner that juts defiantly skyward, a lone rocky resister to the forces of erosion that wore everything else away. Rugged, individualistic, idealistic, the “Live Free or Die” state was a cradle of the American Revolution and has long been the grave of administrative ambition, featuring neither seat-belt laws for adults nor a general sales tax. It has a vibrant secessionist movement and the highest rate of machine-gun ownership in the nation. Individualism reigns—or so we are told—even as large swaths of the southern part of the state have been turned into charmless concrete strip malls. In Somersworth, a small cemetery is bombarded all day and night by the distorted voices emanating from a loudspeaker at a KFC/Taco Bell franchise,…

People say North Carolina is one of the swingiest of swing states. Having lived here for 21 years, I see the truth in it. Republican Legislature, Democratic governor—that’s both the persistent reality and a serviceable metaphor. You often find yourself chock-ablock with your enemies. For us lefties, that means the most atavistic Dixie stereotypes, newly pumped on Trump juice, featuring both the wealthy-racist-snob and hostile-worm-farmer varietals. For those on the right, millions of whom are no doubt poring over this text with open minds, there are the liberals of the Research Triangle, plus small but entrenched bohemian communities everywhere you look (especially in the mountains). Socially speaking, there’s no avoiding each other. When we North Carolinians are at our best, we occasionally get along and establish weird pockets of middle…

Oklahoma embodies American disunion as well as any state. It’s a geographically peculiar place, not traditionally associated with any of the country’s regions—certainly not the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest, and ill-fitted to the West, the Midwest, and the South as well. It’s also a small state, at 4 million people, with two significant metropolises, Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The former is a Southern city, the latter a Western city—a drive of less than two hours separates them. The far southeast of the state is known as Little Dixie and butts up against the Ozark Mountains; the opposite end, a distinctive strip of land that no one particularly wanted, is about as close to the Wild West as you’re going to find in the 21st century. They call it the…

As a teenager, my great-grandmother Ruth Sinykin rode bareback across the South Dakota prairie. Each day, a new adventure: hail the size of baseballs, prairie fires, rattlesnakes. Once, a surprise blizzard, and she was lost for hours, surviving by drafting off the cows’ heat. These anecdotes traffic in pluck and grit, like every story I heard about my homesteading ancestors when I was growing up. Veracity was less important than the overarching theme that we had survived, even thrived, on the stark, dust-blown plains. Here is what I know as fact: In the late 19th century, my family was living in Russia, where as Jews they weren’t allowed to own land. Ruth’s father had been beaten and nearly killed in a pogrom. Fleeing for their lives, they came to South…

A pair of three-foot-tall bronze beehives engraved with “Industry,” the state’s motto, sit on the steps of the Utah State Capitol, gifts from Kennecott Utah Copper, which operates the world’s largest open-pit mine. The honeybee is the state insect of Utah, and its hives—symbols of industry and unity—appear on everything from highway signs and the state flag to the iconography of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The effect of such an unwavering commitment to industry is visible from the Capitol steps: A massive chunk of the Oquirrh Mountains has been ripped away for the Kennecott mine, and Kennecott’s chimney—the tallest man-made structure west of the Mississippi River—puffs out plumes of toxic air from the copper-smelting process. The great gift of living in Utah is that 68 percent…

Walls are a big part of our world. Like any goodtour guide, I’ve embraced the wisdom of the“dual narrative approach” when introducing travelers to such barriers. To really understand a wall, you need to talk with people on both sides of that wall—whether Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land or Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. But what about in our own country? Perhaps all Americans would benefit by getting out a bit more and exploring our own country. Maybe start by going purple. In America, we’re grappling with a mighty, if metaphorical, wall dividing our nation—one that we’ve painted blue and red. And as we search for a solution to the culture war raging around us, the challenge will be to talk to people on both sides of that…

I HAVE LIVED IN AMERICA FOR MOST OF MY LIFE, but i had rarely traveled outside of that portion of America that is the United States, except for short trips to urban Canada and to Mexican resorts. That changed this past February, when I went farther south than I had ever been before, to El Salvador. My timing was perfect, for I arrived on the same day as Marco Rubio. The rumor was that Rubio stayed at the Hilton on his first international trip as US secretary of state, while I stayed two miles away at the less glamorous Sheraton. We were both in San Salvador as part of a project that I think of as Greater America: Rubio was there to build it, and I was there to criticize…

SHIPS ARE A TRIP. VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING we use or consume, from apple computers to chiquita bananas, makes its way to us by sea. much of what we think of as western civ was borne on a boat: imperialism, of course, but also epic poetry (the odyssey), modernist literature (moby-dick), blockbuster cinema (titanic), and even questionable reality tv (below deck, anyone?). when it comes to the rest of the world, ships are just as central: What would our world look like without ancient Egyptian shipbuilders, Polynesian voyagers, Japanese traders, and Somali merchants? Forget globalization: Would we even have a globe? In his bizarre book Land and Sea, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt went so far as to assert that all of human history was defined by “the battle of sea…

AMERICANS ARE UNUSUALLY PREOCCUPIED WITH WORK. it is not just that we think about work all the time, that we feel guilty about not working, that we don’t take off all of our paid vacation days. it’s that we are constantly worrying about how much other people are working. you have surely had that coworker who side-eyed your sick day or complained that others weren’t pulling their weight. maybe you were that coworker. we are all beholden, in our own minds and in the minds of others, to what Max Weber called “the Protestant ethic” of work. Our new Silicon Valley overlords have taken this mindset to new levels of insanity and fraudulence. They boast about sleeping in their offices and their 120-hour workweeks as they “build the modern world”…

ORGANIZED CRIME HAS LONG BEEN MYTHOLOGIZED AS the darker side of the American dream—of the drive to hustle and succeed, to create your own opportunities whatever it takes. It’s a world with its own codes of honor and family structures, but it still ends with Tony Soprano moving to a McMansion in the suburbs. Film and television have often glamorized crime, lending cachet to a world defined by violence and exploitation, where men can still be men and anyone with a plan has a chance. But particularly in those depictions rooted in ethnic and immigrant communities, organized crime has also been a theme that tracks inheritance and the changing of generations—from debates over old-school methods and drug dealing in The Godfather and Goodfellas to the shifting technology in The Wire.…