Sean Wilentz bluntly defines the stakes of this election; Katherine C. Epstein laments the death of research and its consequences for our culture; Ryan Ruby presides over the unlikely meeting of Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka; Mark Edmondson diagnoses the fever in contemporary politics; Sohrab Ahmari exposes the sordid depths to which rightwing extremism has sunk; Jonathan Zimmerman pushes back against the opponents of higher education; Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson argue that “We The People” is not as clear as it looks; William Deresiewicz describes what is absent from social relations in America; Ramachandra Guha introduces the founding poet of the environmental movement, Rabindranath Tagore; Ange Mlinko resurrects the art of Amy Clampitt; Steven B. Smith reveals what is truly revolutionary about our sixteenth president; in Teaching Ellison by Annie Abrams: A high school teacher, a great writer, and how to live; Celeste Marcus on a film, a great director, and the rise of fascism; Leon Wieseltier examines the grotesque intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism and Vanceism; and new poetry from David Grossman, Erica McAlpine and Devin Johnston.
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December 2024
My favorite moment in the Kamala Harris campaign was when she gave a lengthy disquisition at Fordham University about how Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance can help the electorate better conceptualize the power of right-wing propaganda in a “post-truth” society. Even if Harris’s Derridean analysis represents the high-water mark of her electoral effort, it is...
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In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.” Lucky rare Edna O’Brien, who died this past July at the age of 93, did both. She exploded onto the world scene in 1960 with...
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To understand bigotry, study the bigot not its victim. The exercise is a repudiation of the poison but it is also rational: bigotry is fostered, nurtured, and manifested by all manner of factors which affix to a victim – usually (but not always) a vulnerable one – but which have little to do with them....
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Empathy with the victor benefits the rulers. ...
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When the anti-republican Action Française group wanted to incite a revolution against democracy in Paris in 1934, they chose to perform a “freely” translated version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about a tragic Roman tyrant. Coriolanus has plenty of useful material for the demotically agitating translator. Audience riots ensued. Both the socialists and the fascists...
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After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of art something has been gained for the human race and “the work of art transmits an...
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This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X. Under various and ever-shifting policies curtailing access to asylum, dating back to the Trump administration and continuing through that of Biden, United States-bound refugees from all...
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WITH Hamze Awawde; Zack Beauchamp; Francesca Dannunzio; Shay Khatiri; Jessica Pishko; Matthew Sitman; A.E. Stallings; Rafia Zakaria An American Wakes Up in Athens, Greece After the 2024 Elections A.E. Stallings’ book Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon will be published in 2025....
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It’s almost over. This week, hundreds of millions of citizens are off to the polls to play their part in the great American exploding gender reveal party. It’s the most consequential election in living memory. Again. and the whole world is watching through its fingers. Of course we are. No other nation with equivalent international hit...
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In October, Trump announced he would hold a rally on the final Saturday of his campaign in Salem, Virginia. The decision to come to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians made no strategic sense: if Trump comes even close to winning the state the election will have been a rout, and the...
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In order to attend press screenings at the New York Film Festival, you have to scan in your ID badge. These badges are color-coded, with orange and red representing high value members of the industry and press who always get in; the rest of us greens have to line up and hope the Walter Reade...
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I will enter a polling station in Washington, D.C., in several days and vote for the first time. The thought of filling in a ballot may be mundane for millions of Americans who have done it (or forgotten or merely not bothered to do it) routinely every two or four years for all of their...
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The lives of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza was reduced to hell at the moment Hamas launched their attack on the morning of Oct 7th, 2023. At sunrise that day, as news of Hamas’ attack on Israel spread across Gaza, the people knew what was coming. People in Gaza started preparing themselves for the horrors...
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A friend of mine once asked me why I get so worked up about Jewish Currents, a left-wing American magazine known for airing anti-Zionist views. Of all the actors large and small that help shape the narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why care about a magazine based in Long Island with a few thousand subscribers? ...
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I had the dream again — in it, dad was still alive and was hiding somewhere in the house. Usually in the attic by the box fan — sitting under a light bulb, silent and watchful and bald, like some wise nesting bird. Other times, he was wedged up behind the top shelves of my...
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One of the strangest things about modern American reality — marked as it is by a multitude of threatening cataclysms (environmental, nuclear, fascist) that seem to loom closer all the time — is that it is funny. Who can deny that the geriatric TV showman, who looks like a cartoon character, pumping his fists and...
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Child refugees and the children of refugees experience a unique longing for a place they never knew. But they also long for a place that does not exist. Our parents in exile create an elaborate fantasy of what their homeland could have been and make it real with the strength of their desires. Because when...
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David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Despite the relative obscurity of even successful writers, especially those most regarded for literary fiction, Wallace continues to generate...
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“[T]he ‘kids’, as the phrase goes, ‘got to me.'” Thus concluded Irving Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope. The book, which appeared in 1982, includes reflections on his conflicts with the New Left during the 60s. All through that decade Howe upheld the banner of democratic socialism, a socialism deeply informed by liberal values, against...
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Print the legend On July 18, 1953, a painfully shy recent high school graduate walked into the Memphis Recording Service, a storefront studio perched at 706 Union Ave in Memphis. The outer office contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and 36-year-old Marion Keisker, who, among her many other duties, screened hopeful musicians who came through...
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The presidential election of 2024 is in fact the unfolding of the rolling coup d’état that began in earnest four years ago. To imagine otherwise is to normalize what is patently abnormal and thus to falsify the crisis. It is to comprehend our politics as much of the political media does, clinging to shattered institutional...
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In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. The king, Charles II, had made clear through his policies and actions that he sought to centralize control by establishing an...
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The first time the drone strikes intensified it was just after Thanksgiving, and I was already a bit depressed to have celebrated with Crimean Tatar food rather than turkey and cranberry sauce. That Friday night, like the one before, air alerts were on for hours. This time felt different. My roommate slept in the hallway...
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The most precious object for a person trapped in hell is a means of navigation. This is true of physical misery and emotional or psychological misery, and it is true both literally and figuratively. Navigation is vital. Keep that in mind. If someone in Washington, DC, where I live, was tempted to visit the village...
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In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its museums; or perhaps...
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For well over a century, the favored metaphor for Balkan trouble has been fire. A cartoon from the eve of World War I depicts the Great Powers — Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary — standing atop a cauldron of boiling water, struggling to contain the “Balkan troubles” therein. A few decades before that, Otto...
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Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box...
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“We must stem the tide of malice,” Mary Bennet says to her sister Elizabeth after they learn that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, has run off to London with Mr. Wickham, “and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.” Elizabeth can only “[lift] up her eyes in amazement” at this...
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My family left Capri sipping cordials. Aboard the skipper, alongside us, was a young couple from the Southeastern U.S. The husband chatted up my father. He was in his late thirties, working as a financial broker-dealer in North Georgia, and feeling the ceiling. His own zip and zeal, he felt, were underfoaming, and the rural...
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Now you’re telling me You’re not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague — Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust” I In the autumn of 2018, I received from an estranged family member in Vienna some documents once belonging to my great-grandmother,...
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My face mask is strapped wrong such that the yellow bands strain awkwardly on the back of my skull, bunching up my hair into a silly-looking poof, but I don’t notice because there’s a whirring machine in front of me, looping a pad of gray foam in quick circles, ready to brush something. I am...
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You can trust my characters. Whatever else they are — and they’re not always nice — at least they’re upfront. They don’t hide anything. They scream, laugh, cry, jump around and get drunk. But our society makes people into hidden people — stiff upper lip, keep quiet, don’t show it. I suppose if there is...
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My mother has charged me with transferring my father’s ashes from the cardboard box they have been sitting in for years into a proper urn. We sit together in the wood-paneled living room, littered with packing peanuts and a collection of ornamental urns and mini-urns she has bought on eBay. “Well what do you think?”...
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