I’d been working in one form or another since I was 14—delivering newspapers in Hollywood, Florida; busing tables and washing dishes (and teaching Hebrew) in Memphis; flipping burgers in Reading. But an internship was a new concept to me. A more worldly friend advised me to do it if I could afford to. So I slept on another friend’s couch until I passed the test for the hack license that let me drive a taxi on the weekends to pay the bills in New York, and presented myself at The Nation.

Reader, I stuck around, contributing book reviews and the odd article, followed by dispatches from London. Then in 2014, Katrina vanden Heuvel asked me to write the magazine’s history, which led to our working together on the 150th Anniversary Issue—which eventually led to my taking over as editor four years later. Now I’m returning to writing, with this 160th Anniversary issue the bookend to my tenure.

These six years have been a wild ride through some of the most turbulent times in the country’s—and The Nation’s—history. But rather than dwell on the past, we thought it would be better to take this moment to look outward, at the state of our deeply divided country—and the 50 states of our current disunion. We reached out to writers and artists in every state—from Michael Clune to Judy Chicago—to tell us how things look from where they stand. The results are as surprising as they are varied.

We also have an essay in this issue from Viet Thanh Nguyen, John Nichols on the stakes of this moment, plus Atossa Araxiam Abrahamian on the relations between shipping and capitalism; Jorge Cotte on the series Deli Boys; Karrie Jacobs on Norman Foster’s edifice at 270 Park Avenue; Evan Kindley on the poet James Schuyler; Samuel Moyn on Quentin Skinner and the politics of freedom; and Libby Watson on Brian Goldstone’s anatomy of the housing crisis.

As for me, while you won’t see me writing this newsletter, you might see me in the links. I’m sticking around as a special correspondent.

Thanks for reading!

– D.D. Guttenplan

Editor, The Nation

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