The Nation

What you're reading

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, founded in 1865 by abolitionists in the aftermath of the Civil War. It is based in New York and publishes both a print weekly and a daily digital edition. The masthead is explicitly progressive; the magazine has been on the American left for its entire history, covering labor, civil rights, foreign policy, and economic inequality.

Editor emerita Katrina vanden Heuvel led the magazine from 1995 to 2019 and remains publisher; she retains an ownership stake. Contributors include long-tenured columnists, academic essayists, and reported features from staff correspondents. Audience is small relative to mass-market news — circulation in the low hundreds of thousands — but concentrated among engaged American progressives, academics, and movement organizers. Reach is amplified by the Nation Institute, podcasts, and a long-running events arm.

Ownership & funding

The Nation Company, L.P. (Katrina vanden Heuvel). Funded primarily through subscription + reader donations.

Subscription plus reader donations means The Nation answers to its readers and a small donor base rather than advertisers. That insulates coverage from advertiser pressure and rewards deep, ideologically-coherent argument that subscribers renew for. The trade-off is audience capture: the business model works only if readers feel the magazine reliably reflects a progressive worldview, which removes any commercial incentive to cover stories in ways that might unsettle that base. Reader donations also mean the magazine can run long-form investigations and foreign reporting that ad-supported digital outlets cannot afford.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The Nation at Left with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly places The Nation at Left because the magazine is explicit about its politics — it does not market itself as neutral. Story selection prioritizes labor organizing, Palestinian rights, anti-war foreign policy, climate movements, and critiques of US economic concentration. Framing assumes that capitalism and US empire are legitimate subjects of structural critique, which is well to the left of the Lean Left band populated by The Atlantic or The Washington Post.

The pattern breaks where The Nation reports critically on Democratic Party leadership and centrist Democrats — coverage of the DNC, Biden-administration foreign policy, and corporate Democrats is often sharper than coverage of the same officials in mainstream lean-left outlets. The Mostly Factual rating reflects strong sourcing on reported features and investigative pieces, but the opinion-and-essay tradition that defines the magazine sometimes treats interpretive claims as established, which is the standard pattern at ideologically-explicit magazines and is the gap between Mostly Factual and High.

Editorial vs news side

The Nation is opinion-and-argument first. Reported features exist and are tagged as such, but the magazine’s identity is the essay, the column, and the long argument. There is no firewall between news and opinion in the way there is at a daily newspaper because the whole product is interpretive. Readers should treat every piece as written from a known editorial stance; that stance is the point of the magazine and is the reason subscribers pay for it.

Why we include them in nwsly

US politics and culture weekly founded in 1865.

In the Left band, The Nation gives nwsly a long-tradition American socialist-and-progressive voice that Jacobin, Mother Jones, and The Intercept don’t fully cover. It surfaces labor stories, foreign-policy critique from the left of the Democratic Party, and historical-essay framing that connects current stories to decades-long arcs. nwsly pulls it where a story needs the magazine’s archive depth or its specific take on US economic and foreign-policy decisions.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The Nation

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