hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.”

And while here at The Nation we still attend, every day, to the fierce urgencies and increasingly terrible exigencies of the news cycle, in our print incarnation we’ve had, of necessity, to make more space for the enduring and the unexpected. Happily, this month’s cover story, by our Deputy Editor Lizzy Ratner, manages to capture both.

For many years, Lizzy and Kai Wright, host of WNYC’s Notes From America, talked about a mystery that wouldn’t let go of them: an infant’s grave on Hart’s Island dating back to the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, marked obscurely as “SC-B1 1985.” As Lizzy explains in fascinating detail, the journey to search for “Special Case-Baby 1”—which in addition to this story also resulted in a new podcast—was full of unexpected twists and turns.

Speaking of surprises, you might not think the rise and fall of public housing in New York would be an obvious subject for a comic, but Eric Orner has returned to our pages to prove you wrong. Faithful readers will also recognize Mari Uyehara—who wrote this issue’s profile of Viet Thanh Nguyen—as a longtime contributor whose encounter with another longtime contributor is exceptionally illuminating.

And while the same can be said of Mohammed El Kurd’s introduction to photographs of Palestine from before the Nakba, the word I would use for that particular lost world is “heartbreaking.” We’re finding a little bit of hope in the solidarity for the Palestinian cause seen at the Oscar’s and the protest at the Museum of Modern Art, described in a dispatch by two of our current interns.

We hope you find the same in the features and essays throughout the March issue, including Stephanie Burt’s on Lucy Sante’s late-life transition, Osita Nwanevu on Bidenism and its discontents, Kate Wagner on how to save the 21st-century city, and Adolph Reed on the relationship between social movements and electoral politics.

That latter topic has long been a theme at The Nation. But then over 159 years, you’d expect us to have had some recurring preoccupations. Indeed, I would argue that taking the long view is part of what has allowed us to survive and thrive—even as media has as of late has been falling and falling. Our hope is that over the long haul, Nation readers will have become, like Cavafy’s travelers, “wise” and “full of experience.” Thanks for taking the time.

D.D. Guttenplan,

Editor, The Nation