Tradition
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Obituary
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December 23, 2025
(Bennett Raglin / WireImage) (Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan through Getty Pictures) (Robin Marchant / Getty Pictures)
As this dismal 12 months attracts to its dismal shut, it’s by some means consoling to replicate on the lives we misplaced in 2025—lovely writers, influential editors, and dedicated activists, cherished members of the prolonged Nation household—and to look again on the writings they contributed to the journal. Their phrases provide a much-needed testimony to the lengthy, turbulent battle for decency, democracy, liberty, and equality on this nation and all over the world. No matter violent delights 2026 has in retailer, the legacies of those that got here earlier than can and may function an inspiration and a information.
Among the many buddies the journal misplaced was the satirical artist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, who died in January on the age of 95. “Feiffer was America’s premier satirical cartoonist,” Jeet Heer wrote in an obituary, “the artist who finest captured the tone and timbre of American public rhetoric and personal anxiousness from the time of Dwight Eisenhower to Invoice Clinton.”
Along with his long-running weekly cartoon strip within the Village Voice, Feiffer wrote performs, motion pictures, novels, memoirs. Heer famous that Feiffer’s finest work got here when he allowed his satire to be leavened with empathy for the themes he skewered: “He usually balanced political contempt with human sympathy.” He had mastered, partly by a lifelong engagement with theater and appearing, “the power to take a look at the world by the eyes of even essentially the most unsympathetic soul.”
Just a few months earlier than Feiffer’s demise, Peter Kuper interviewed the legendary artist for The Nation. Feiffer had misplaced none of his dyspeptic chew in describing his trajectory from rising up within the age of Joseph McCarthy to residing out his closing years within the age of Donald Trump:
[S]haking the cage is what I discovered myself drifting into doing, and discovering I had no alternative however to do this as a result of I used to be residing in a rustic that scared the shit out of me by way of the course it was going. And for those who ask me how I modified the nation, nicely, at present I discover myself residing in a rustic the place I’m scared shitless due to the course wherein we’re going.
The Nation printed a variety of Feiffer’s articles, speeches, and cartoons over time, together with a prescient depiction in 1996 of the proto-Trump GOP presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, who grins mischievously as hordes of followers shout in joyous unison from the obvious security of his huge paws, about to be crushed.
In 1981, The Nation printed a model of a graduation deal with that Feiffer had given on the Pratt Institute in regards to the mythology of “Film America” within the age of Ronald Reagan. Although we stay beneath a president formed much less by the formal calls for of cinema than the must-watch spectacle of actuality TV, it stills speaks to our second:
With a hard-line ideology now in energy, the stage is about for a debate that may show or disprove arguments which have been chewed over for generations. Out of this debate will emerge a brand new American character both extra authoritarian and repressive or extra democratic and egalitarian. Extra curious and subsequently extra keen to undergo the issues and uncertainties that go along with change or extra willfully ignorant and arming to the enamel in opposition to the risk.
We are actually full-fledged combatants in a warfare film. A battle for the soul of the nice outdated F.S.A.—the Fragmented States of America. I hope you’re on my aspect.
Present Situation
In April, the poet and critic Joshua Clover handed away on the age of 62. A professor of literature on the College of California, Davis, Clover was the writer of a variety of books spanning topics from pop music to the political concept of riots, in addition to a number of extensively acclaimed poetry collections. Clover was lengthy a fixture of The Nation’s Books and the Arts part. His first Nation overview, printed in 2007, involved the poetry of Rod Smith, whereas his final was a pointy evaluation and appreciation of The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann’s 2016 Netflix sequence on the origins of hip-hop. In between have been virtually impossibly erudite essays on matters from Baudelaire to economics, and a month-to-month column, “Pop & Circumstance,” which supplied Clover’s perspective on nation music, Sport of Thrones, and Chomsky v. Zizek.
Juliana Spahr wrote in her Nation tribute to Clover that “there have been so many Joshuas, usually contradicting but steadily overlapping.” There was “Joshua the Militant,” a dedicated activist to the tip of his life, and there was “Joshua the Political Theorist,” “Joshua the Scholar,” “Joshua the Organizer of Summer season Camps,” “Joshua the Convention Organizer,” “Joshua the Writer of Commune Editions and Editor of Commune Journal,” “Joshua the Tweeter, lover of barbs and jabs, the shit-talker, the contrarian,” “Joshua the Marxist,” “Joshua the Organizer of Lengthy Bike Rides,” “Joshua the Educational,” “Joshua the Connoisseur of Gummy Candies.”
After which there was Joshua the Poet. He knew tips on how to flip a phrase, construct optimism, and remind us to like one another not simply inside occupied buildings but additionally throughout the quick, restricted traces of verse…. [I]f his writing is anyone single factor, it’s an invite to hitch him in refusing to die.
Elizabeth Pochoda, a beloved literary editor of the journal throughout a lot of the mid-Seventies and thru the Eighties, and a contributor for a few years past that, died in Might on the age of 83. Gene Seymour wrote a shifting tribute to her:
She was a kind of illuminated beings whose eyes entered a room—or your senses—earlier than the remainder of her did. These large pale orbs introduced a hot-wired depth that was at the next, deeper stage than most individuals have been accustomed to casually encounter. To various levels, it was unsettling at first when Betsy aimed this depth on you. Till you discovered (and it normally didn’t take very lengthy) that her focus was a present, an acknowledgment that she’d seen one thing in you that aligned together with her personal formidable mind and complete passions. Such a gathering of minds promised fruitful and gratifying outcomes, particularly for those who have been a author and have been fortunate sufficient to have her as your editor.
Like Clover’s, Pochoda’s pursuits ranged extensively, from her first items for the journal, a two-parter on the most recent Czech fiction, to her theater opinions of the Nineteen Nineties and her transient column “Studying Round,” a type of high-brow pre-Web aggregator of all of the essential essays and opinions and literary gossip value taking discover of that week.
Along with her involvement with many different publications, together with Grand Road, which she helped discovered, and The Journal Antiques, Pochoda stored writing for The Nation till shortly earlier than her demise, together with tributes to former Nation comrades, Arthur Danto and Victor Navasky, an obit for Philip Roth, and meditations on American artwork and historical past.
In 2015, Pochoda wrote an essay for The Nation’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary concern reflecting on her tenure as literary editor—the liberty she loved from the remainder of the journal that prolonged to her writers; the occasional political tensions and disagreements that resulted between the Books part and the remainder of the journal; her favourite items to reread—amongst them, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s 1986 critique of Joan Didion: “an outraged and outrageous piece,” Pochoda wrote, “splendidly fallacious often and far more splendidly proper.”
Seymour wrote in his obituary, “Betsy’s vary of pursuits and her unerring intuition for matching writers with topics broadened her status as a flexible, incisive editor and solidified the devotion of writers who adopted her wherever she went, benefiting from her solicitousness and enthusiasm towards their particular person voices in addition to her insights into tips on how to amplify and improve their work.”
What extra can an editor do or be?
June introduced the passing of Invoice Moyers, some of the influential journalists of the previous 50 years. After starting his profession as a younger aide and speechwriter to Lyndon Johnson, then as White Home press secretary, Moyers grew disillusioned by the politically corrosive and morally indefensible Vietnam Conflict. Leaving Washington, Moyers reinvented himself as a newspaper editor (at Lengthy Island’s Newsday), then as a broadcaster, finally changing into essentially the most outstanding media determine related to public tv.
Over greater than 4 many years at PBS—which he had helped create, as John Nichols reminded us when Moyers died—he produced and hosted landmark sequence like Invoice Moyers Journal and Frontline, in addition to numerous specials on matters similar to cash in politics, company energy, racial justice, religion, environmental degradation, and the erosion of democratic norms. Whilst industrial media aided and abetted the focus of wealth and energy on the high of society, Moyers insisted that journalism must be a type of public service fairly than leisure.
Moyers’s essays in our pages over time touched on the corrupting affect of cash in politics and the debasement of journalism within the age of media consolidation. In 2012, Moyers and his frequent collaborator Bernard Weisberger guest-edited a particular concern, “The 1 % Court docket.” Within the wake of the Residents United choice, the problem assessed simply how hole the justices’ dedication to democracy had change into. In his introduction, Moyers defined what could be wanted to combat again: “[T]he battle is on many fronts, and shall be gained not solely by voters on election day however by residents engaged at each stage of democracy and in each peaceable type of protest. There may be just one response to this usurpation of democracy: defiance.”
In November and December, respectively, we misplaced Peter and Cora Weiss, indefatigable activists who had spent many years supporting human rights and civil liberties in america and all over the world. “He by no means ceased to push for a extra simply system, a extra equitable system,” Peter Kornbluh of the Nationwide Safety Archive mentioned of Peter, a path-breaking lawyer, on Democracy Now! “There’s not sufficient phrases to explain how essential Peter was to the progressive motion, to human rights, over these final many years.”
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Peter Weiss first wrote for The Nation in 1953 as a younger legal professional working within the subject of worldwide financial growth. By means of an extended and illustrious profession spent preventing to finish the Vietnam Conflict and South African apartheid, suing Henry Kissinger, and searching for restitution for victims of the US-backed Nicaraguan contras, amongst different causes, Weiss periodically returned to the journal with new concepts and analyses. In 1993, he and two co-authors printed a name for “International New Deal.” The authors proposed changing corporate-friendly commerce pacts like NAFTA with “a brand new set of continental guidelines and measures, together with the safety of labor rights and office well being and security requirements.” As a substitute of countries’ signing agreements to profit the rich on the expense of the poor, he referred to as for them to group collectively to guard the setting, increase incomes for wage-earners, and divert navy spending to socially helpful functions.
Cora Weiss, Peter’s longtime accomplice in each life and activism, died a month after her husband. She had written obituaries for The Nation in regards to the German Inexperienced Social gathering founder Petra Kelly and her fellow peace activist Dagmar Wilson. In 2016, she wrote a letter to the editor taking concern with an article the journal had printed that she thought-about overly essential and dismissive of the United Nations, the place she labored with the Worldwide Peace Bureau. “The UN is simply nearly as good as its 193 components,” she wrote. “Our world could be immeasurably worse with out it.”
As it will likely be with out these cherished buddies of humanity, the nation, and The Nation. Allow us to revenue from their knowledge.
Over the previous 12 months you’ve learn Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky tackle the Trump household’s corruption, set the file straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Wholesome Once more motion, survey the fallout and human price of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court docket’s harmful antidemocratic rulings, and amplify profitable ways of resistance on the streets and in Congress.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and writer, The Nation
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