Volume 6 - Number 1 Explore this issue

Fall 2025 Issue

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In the Fall 2025 issue: Jackson Arn on the mindless expansion of art museums; David Greenberg on the nonsense of “neoliberalism”; Cass R. Sunstein on what AI cannot do, now or ever;  Julia Kieserman on privacy and the pill; James P. Rubin on the Democrats and the fight for American foreign policy; Ryan Ruby on literary canons here and elsewhere; Vanessa Garcia on love and first responders; Henry Oliver on Shakespeare’s mothers;   Michael Walzer on unlikely meetings with uncommonly interesting people; Paul Reitter on Marx’s adventures in mimesis; Paul North on the inner life of things made and traded; Anna Ballan on womanly ecstasy according to Charlotte Brontë; Robert Rubsam on Yasunari Kawabata’s art of distance; Didi Tal on “I Am an American Day”; Yahia Lababidi on the startling intensity of Blaise Pascal; Fateme Karimkhan in Tehran under fire; Celeste Marcus on the revolutionary synagogue; and Leon Wieseltier on the shopkeeper who gave him the gift of doubt. As well as poetry from John Berryman and Myles Zavelo.

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It’s like a meteor of intelligent substance that landed on my desk.

Thomas L. Friedman

A triumph for freedom of thought.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Liberties sure is needed in these times.

Bill Maher

Liberty is under threat and Liberties girds us for the fight.

George Stephanopuolos

Something was missing in our culture, and here it is.

Tina Brown

Invaluable.

David Brooks

Liberties: Some serious food for thought.

Christiane Amanpour

Liberties is THE place to be.

Wynton Marsalis

A murderers row of important, fortifying, and inspiring writers.

Aaron Sorkin

Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected. I am hooked.

Ralph Fiennes

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts — old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Aatish Taseer

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile

On November 7th, 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer's Indian citizenship. Return to Self: Excursions in Exile is a memoir about processing that violent ejection; the meaning of self after statehood; and the gross brutality, so recognizable to Americans todaym, which forced that rupture.

Daniel Elkind

Dr Chizhevsky's Chandelier

Daniel Elkind and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Elkind's new book Dr Chizhevsky's Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and other Heresies of the Twentieth Century

View All Podcasts



Liberties Sidebar

Kafka Inc.

by

December 22, 2025

Dr. Franz Kafka, as he is officially listed, is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery, about a mile down the road from where I live in the neighbourhood of Žižkov. The greater Olšany Cemetery, which it adjoins, is across the street from my apartment. I often go there for walks in the evening, meandering along...

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Purity Tests, Art’s Hemlock

by

December 1, 2025

On September 9, the Munich Philharmonic inaugurated its 2025/26 season with the sort of solid, crowd-pleasing program that a major orchestra uses to set its tone for the year. From the elegant stage of the Isar philharmonic, the city’s new concert hall, the orchestra performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring the radiant Sol Gabetta, Schubert’s “Unfinished,”...

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Hollywood, Motherhood, and Vicky Krieps’ Ode to Love

by

November 24, 2025

Reviews of Love Me Tender (which premiered at the Cannes film festival last summer) describe it as a film about motherhood. This description is not inaccurate, but it is importantly limited. Love Me Tender is in part a story of two parents fighting over custody. Vicky Krieps plays Clemence, a mother struggling with a manipulative...

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Our Liberalism: Dispatch From Mexico

by

November 19, 2025

A decade ago, on the first occasion that I ever heard Leon Wieseltier speak, he uttered a phrase that I have been thinking about ever since. Leon confessed he suffered from what he called “historical envy” because his mentors — giants like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Gershom Scholem — had fought epoch-altering battles for...

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How would a man write about a salmon?

by

November 17, 2025

How would a man write about a salmon? Abstract. Broad strokes. Shades of secondary colors: Pinks, teals, grays. Mirrors of himself. Fins moving independently to guide His naval journey. When the clear shock of Freshwater passes through his open throat Causing a mute bubble celebration To trail his path upstream towards metaphor, Towards the life...

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Orange

by

November 17, 2025

The wind passes by my father’s skin, leaving not a bruise but a memory.   Yes, I admit: I am practicing grief. My father has died twice now by my count.   I am practicing death, like a Buddhist monk bowing a hundred and eight times,   knees touching the floor. This is devotion: rising,...

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Homecoming, North Carolina

by

November 17, 2025

My eyes tonight have no care for the careful geometries of these Southern houses. My hands are on the wheel and I can’t wipe my eyes. J’s out in the park chasing balls and girls, dirt and flesh fused together on his knees. Once, we wore shorts of the same neon blue. Or was it...

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Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts ��� old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Aatish Taseer

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile

On November 7th, 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer's Indian citizenship. Return to Self: Excursions in Exile is a memoir about processing that violent ejection; the meaning of self after statehood; and the gross brutality, so recognizable to Americans todaym, which forced that rupture.

Daniel Elkind

Dr Chizhevsky's Chandelier

Daniel Elkind and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Elkind's new book Dr Chizhevsky's Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and other Heresies of the Twentieth Century

View All Podcasts



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