Following is an excerpt from The Nation Guide to the Nation by Richard Lingeman and the editors of The Nation, with an introduction by Victor Navasky and Katrina vanden Heuvel, with illustrations by Ed Koren.

Frances Fitzgerald

I’m a New Yorker, born and bred, and there are so many places I love in the city I can’t even count  them. But if I had to choose my favorite place, it would have to be Grand Central Station. To me, its main concourse ranks with the Parthenon, the nave of Chartres Cathedral, and the courtyards of the Forbidden City in Beijing, as one of the great man-made spaces in the world (and one of the few made for entirely secular purposes). Flanked by anonymous skyscrapers and crowded streets, it’s a huge surprise in the city. A half million people pass through it every day, yet its majestic height and its perfect proportions give it an extraordinary serenity. People hurrying to work or rushing to their trains rarely look up, but we all feel its influence because, though our paths cross from every angle, we don’t collide or exchange angry words, as we might in the subways or the streets. The space can’t be photographed, much as tourists try. It’s a presence. And when I look up, I feel a sense of elation.

– Frances Fitzgerald is author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fire in the Lake, Cities on a Hill, America Revised, and other books.

Dan Wakefield

My favorite American place is Lilly’s Apple Orchard in Indianapolis. In the fall, when the leaves go to gold and the orange pumpkins are fat in the fields, a cup of the rich brown cider at Lilly’s Orchard will soothe the soul more truly than all the Prozac manufactured by Eli’s famous family business.  The place inspired my first published fiction (“Autumn Full of Apples,” in The Best American Stories of 1966), which tells how my high school friends and I climbed the orchard’s iron fences on moonlit nights and illegally picked the apples we ate (all the sweeter for being stolen). If any of my high school friends remain to do the job—and are still able to climb the fence—I’ve assigned them to scatter my ashes beneath those trees.

– Dan Wakefield has written many articles and several novels, including Under the Apple Tree and Going All the Way. His most recent book is The Hijacking of Jesus.
Read More

Fekkak Mamdouh is the co-author, with Rinku Sen, of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization. He’s also the cofounder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York and codirector of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, the country’s first national restaurant worker organization. Until September 11, 2001, he was a headwaiter and beloved union leader at Windows on the World, a restaurant in the World Trade Towers. Mamdouh grew up poor in Morrocco, and then emigrated to Saudi Arabia as a young adult, where he worked for the Saudi Royal Family. He first came to the United States as a paid companion to a Saudi prince, then overstayed his visa and remained here permanently, changing his status from illegal to legal through marriage.

In this PBC video he talks about his life, his organizing work, and what being American means to him.

Learn more about The Accidental American here. And don’t miss this PBC video interview with co-author Rinku Sen.

Buy The Accidental American for FREE when you join Progressive Book Club!

1959: The Year Everything Changed

By Fred Kaplan

1

Breaking the Chains

On January 2, 1959, a Soviet rocket carrying the Lunik I space capsule—also known as Mechta, “the dream”—blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, accelerated to twenty-five thousand miles per hour (the magical speed known as “escape velocity”), sailed past the moon, and pushed free of Earth’s orbit, becoming the first man-made object to revolve around the sun among the celestial bodies. The next issue of Time magazine hailed the feat as “a turning point in the multibillion-year history of the solar system,” for “one of the sun’s planets had at last evolved a living creature that could break the chains of its gravitational field.”

The flight of the Lunik set off a year when chains of all sorts were broken with verve and apprehension—not just in the cosmos, but in politics, society, culture, science, and sex. A feeling took hold that the breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing.

1959 was the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and also commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it—when the world as we now know it began to take form. Read More

A vivid chronicle of a vital but overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion.

It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap—all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.

In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, acclaimed Slate columnist Fred Kaplan takes us back to a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a “new frontier” that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation—a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point.

Drawing on original research, including untapped archives and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces together the vast, untold story of a civilization in flux—and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for the new era. They include:

• Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential ways
• Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the language and skewering politics and religion
• Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz
• John Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood system
• Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating black urban music into mainstream pop culture
• Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, battling the government’s censors and toppling obscenity laws
• Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and racial politics
• Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life
• Jack St. Clair Kilby, a self-described “tinkerer,” inventing the microchip, which triggers the digital age
• Margaret Sanger, a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade scientists to invent a “magic pill” that lets women control their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and feminist revolutions
• John F. Kennedy, the coalescing figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young outsider, keen to grapple with the “unknown opportunities and peril” of the coming “new frontier”—just as Barack Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a new decade in our own turbulent time

Illustrated with sixteen photos, 1959 is a lively and original account of a watershed year in American cultural history, full of amusing anecdotes and vivid description, and bringing a kaleidoscopic cultural transformation into high relief.

Join the Discussion!

Post a comment below to join or start a discussion about 1959.

Click here to learn more about 1959 (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

A searing and ultimately hopeful exploration of love, psychological trauma, and the boundaries of memory.

Alone in a Helsinki café, Anna, a young journalist, spends a day drinking coffee and reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The novel, a gift from her professor and now lover, an American named Ian, becomes a lens through which Anna can view her own life. Compelling and poignant, the narrative floats in and out of geography and time, exploring psychological trauma and the boundaries of memory. Elina Hirvonen deftly intertwines the childhood of Anna and her mentally ill brother with the troubled past of Ian and his father, a Vietnam vet.

Finnish protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the political ramifications of September 11, 2001, provide the contemporary backdrop. The personal is political in When I Forgot, yet in Hirvonen’s hands despair is countered by insight and, above all, hope. With its surprising beauty and assured voice, it’s hard to believe that When I Forgot is this talented author’s first novel.

Join the Discussion!

Post a comment below to join or start a discussion about When I Forgot.

Click here to learn more about When I Forgot (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

[Posted by Elena Sytcheva]

One of the progressive bloggers profiled in Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press is Chris Bowers, who got his start at MyDD and then went to OpenLeft, where he blogs today. In November 2006 Bowers made a tongue-in-cheek (but not entirely) YouTube clip explaining what it takes to become a political blogger.

To give you a flavor: “If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you’re willing to do nothing else in your entire life.”

He later amended the list to include other key job qualifications:

• If you don’t care about having a social life
• If you don’t mind being viciously attacked dozens of times everyday
• If you don’t have a wide range of interests in life
• If you don’t mind paying for your own health insurance
• If you don’t like taking vacations
• If a one-bedroom apartment in West Philly is your idea of high living…

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

In Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm, Steven Apfelbaum chronicles his thirty years on a Wisconsin farm. A restoration ecologist by trade, he slowly re-introduces native life to his 80-acre plot, which had previously been overrun with invasive and exotic species. Below are a few of the invasive fauna he encounters, and some of the native species he reintroduces. The links will take you to the Encyclopedia of Life, where you can learn more.

Invasive Fauna

Ring-necked Pheasant (Phasianus)

European Earwig (Forficula auricularia)

Starling (Sturnus)

Carp (Cyprinus)

European Green Crab (Carcinus maenas)

Chinese Mitten Crab (Eriocheir sinensis)

Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus)

Humans (Homo sapiens)

Native Fauna

Coyote (Canis latrans)

Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis)

White-Footed Mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)

Meadow Vole (Microtus pennsylvanicus)

Lincoln’s Sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii)

Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum)

Henslow’s Sparrow (Ammodramus henslowii)

Long-billed Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris)

Whooping Crane (Grus americana)

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

In Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm, Steven Apfelbaum chronicles his thirty years on a Wisconsin farm. A restoration ecologist by trade, he slowly re-introduces native life to his 80-acre plot, which had previously been overrun with invasive and exotic species. Below are a few of the invasive flora species he encounters, and some of the native species he reintroduces. The links will take you to the Encyclopedia of Life, where you can learn more.

Invasive Flora

Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodium album)

Orchard Grass (Dactylis glomerata)

European Larch (Larix deciduas)

Foxtail Grass (Setaria barbata)

Quack Grass (Elymus repens)

Tartarian Honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica)

English Plantain (Plantago ianceolata)

Reed Canary Grass (Phalaris arundinacea)

White Mulberry (Morus alba)

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata)

Native Flora

Box elder (Acer negundo)

White Ash (Fraxinus americana)

Birdfoot Violets (Viola pedata)

Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Compass Plants (Silphium laciniatum)

Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica)

Heartsease (Viola tricolor)

Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense)

Woodland Geranium (Geranium sylvaticum)

Goldenseal (Hydrastis Canadensis)

Following is an excerpt from Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press by Eric Boehlert.

Following Election Day, blogger Pete Quiley compiled the statistics from key online forums and highlighted how decisively Obama had beat McCain online:

• At Facebook, where the Democrat landed 400,000 new friends in just the last two weeks of the campaign, Obama received 3,032% more hits than McCain did over the course of the election.
• At MySpace, Obama enjoyed nearly four times the number of friends as McCain, and 269% more search results were done for Obama’s name.
• At Flickr, the photo sharing site featured nearly five times more search results for Obama than McCain, and hosted more than 50,000 photos on Obama’s Flickr page. (McCain did not have a page.)
• At Twitter, McCain barely had a presence at the micro-blogging service. Obama sent out nearly ten times more mini-messages than the Republican, had 2,254% more Twitter followers, and 1,029% more Obama searches conducted there.
• At YouTube, Obama generated twice as many search results, posted five times as many videos as McCain, and boasted 117,000 YouTube subscribers along with 25,000 friends.

Here’s our latest video interview, featuring Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. (More about the book here.)