| Once upon a time (the early 1980s), in a city that no longer exists (bohemian Manhattan), I went to interview the poet, author, and activist Grace Paley in her apartment on West 11th Street. When I walked up to the second floor, she was standing in her kitchen slicing a pepper. “Taste this,” she said, holding out a fat red piece. “It’s like cake.”
Whenever anyone cites Percy Shelley’s claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” it is Paley’s kind face that comes to mind.
Like Paley, who died in 2007, Jonathan Kozol has spent decades illuminating lives generally neglected by the media—in his case the children he first encountered as a teacher in Boston’s public schools and whose voices sing out from the pages of his first book, Death at an Early Age, published in 1968. Kozol is still on the case, and it is a great pleasure to have him as the elder statesman of this issue, as well as to introduce readers to Dana Mashoian Walrath, whose Nation debut is a graphic meditation on how her family’s experience with genocide has shaped her response to the ongoing carnage in Gaza.
Our cover story this month was written by Jeet Heer, who traces the rise and political fracturing of Indian Americans, while Mike Bonin and Peter Dreier report from Los Angeles, where too many Democrats regard tenant protection as a greater danger to the city than Republican resurgence. Elsewhere, Evan Malmgren brings some hopeful news from the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California, where Acorn Wireless—a tribally owned Internet provider—is working to offer an alternative to corporate control.
Challenging corporate power—in the workplace, and in the voting booth—is also the theme of strikes correspondent Jane McAlevey’s latest column, while at the back of the book, Matt Karp weighs the consequences of the growing cleavage between the Democratic Party and its working-class base. Stick around for Bijan Stephen’s celebration of Nicki Minaj, Judith Butler on the joys of killjoy feminism, Vivian Gornick’s warm salute to the fiction of Bernard Malamud, and Sarah Chihaya on The Curse.
Finally, in case you missed the rave review in The New York Times, our poetry editor Kaveh Akbar has a new novel out that I want to heartily recommend along with this poem by Fady Joudah, available only at The Nation.
Thanks for reading.
D.D. Guttenplan,
Editor, The Nation |
