Americans believe they have a number of protections on the job, which are common in other democracies (free speech and privacy, defense against capricious firing, etc.). They are wrong. And in her fascinating new book The Workplace Constitution from th...

This book is a ton of fun. To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press) taps the deep and colorful collection of Southern California restaurant menus archived by the Los Angeles Public Library. Author Josh Kun,

In this podcast I discuss Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940 (Yale University Press, 2013) with author Nicholas R. Parrillo, professor of law at Yale University. Parrillo’s book was winner of the 2014 Law and Society...

In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived.

Helen Keller, Franz Kafka and Silent Cal Coolidge appear in this week’s Almanac, a blog to celebrate the 150thanniversary of The Nation, America’s oldest magazine. Nation archivist Richard Kreitner is featuring an event from every day of the year and h...

Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel,

Sam Peckinpah’s career as a writer and director was also filled with controversies, but his reputation has not diminished, more than thirty years after his last film. Paul Seydor began in academics before becoming a highly regarded film editor who knew...

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University. There has been a lot written about the Occupy Wall Street movement...

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union. Launched a movement. And inspired a generation. Two Decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history.” So reads the inside flap ofMiriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of...

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and vocal members of their constituency have strong conviction...

Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic knowledge of accident causation as a key to solving the accident,

How should we look back at President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy legacy? As muddled? Visionary? Or simply uninspired? To answer these questions, James D. Boys has just written Clinton’s Grand Strategy: U.S.

When Star Wars opened in 1977, Robert Hatch, film reviewer for The Nation magazine, wrote that it “belongs in the sub-basement, or interstellar comic-strip school of science fiction, Terry and the Pirates with astro-drive.

In recent decades, as Democrats and Republicans have grown more and more polarized ideologically, and gridlock has becoming increasingly standard in Congress, there has been a noticeable pining for the good old days when bipartisanship was common,

Kevin M. Kruse is professor of history at Princeton University and author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015). Kruse argues that the idea that America was always a “Christian nation” dates from ...

Discussions of punk tend to focus on groups, like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the punk scenes of New York, London, and Los Angeles. Punk, however, was a broader musical cultural movement and sprung up in multiple locations.

For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod,

Lawrence Jacobs is the author (with James Druckman) of Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey School of Public ...

Most of the year, when the weather lets us, my wife and I wind down on our front porch with a bourbon. We live out in the countryside and, for no particular reason, bourbon feels like the right choice as we watch the long grass waving on the hillside a...

The Nation magazine, a beacon of the cultural and political left, is celebrating 150 years of publishing. As part of its celebration, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac that looks at events on each day of the year and how The Nation covere...

Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that in...

Lee Drutman is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (Oxford UP 2015). Drutman is a senior fellow at New America. How do corporations seek influence in Washington?

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century,

The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Calvin Trillin, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, James Baldwin and Naomi Klein.

Just a few weeks ago, we heard Matthew Green discuss the minority in the House. Green explained that the minority party may not be as powerless as we typically think. In Too Weak to Govern: Majority Party Power and Appropriations in the U.S.