Five weeks into his second term, President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order 14253, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” For more than a decade, the order declared, a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” had been “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”…
“The very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken.” Those words were spoken in June 1968 by the great historian Richard Hofstadter in his commencement address at Columbia, which had been convulsed that spring by violent arrests of students protesting the Vietnam War. Hofstadter…
“At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.” THOREAU Then I recently reread “Slavery in Massachusetts,” the angriest essay that Henry David Thoreau ever wrote, and now I can’t get it out of my head. A fugitive slave had been captured in Boston and, despite abolitionist resistance, shipped back…
April 21, 2026 The officer in Iran’s riot police force said that since U.S.-Israeli airstrikes began on February 28, his phone number had changed six times and that each week a new superior would arrive and then vanish. “They go elsewhere and new people come in,” he said. “And all the commanders keep changing their…
I have had occasion in recent months to reformulate my own life story to myself. The last twenty-two years of my life have been taken up with my defense of the liberal democratic project and the exile imposed as punishment for that commitment. This quest began, intellectually, with my dissertation, whose subject was Hispanic American…
The house is a monolith, where southwest adobe meets Tuscan villa. Swallows nest in its shifted terra cotta roof tiles. Doves mate in a decorative mini-cupola as though it were designed for their union’s ceremony. On the north side, away from the street, cracks spider across the stucco where moisture confronts dry heat. The residents…
For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it contributed) and bombardment, that speaks the loudest in the name of Palestinian liberation. For millions of people across the…
What is the difference between a rat and a squirrel? There is no difference — squirrels are just rats with better PR. So runs the joke. Sometimes I think of artificial intelligence like a squirrel with excellent marketing, its overpaid pundits assuring us that nothing more important has ever happened in history, that it is…
“They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure,” the corporate statement reads, “a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” An initial idea was “Pequod,” but it was rejected for sounding awkward, a bad fit for the product. Eventually the company’s founders settled…
On the long list of things that bother me about much of the left today, especially in the West, is its allergy to patriotism. In my own understanding of human commitments, loving your country and holding socialist ideals are not contradictory commitments. One can easily maintain both. But the history of the left shows that…
June 21, 1988 Dear Joseph Brodsky, It has now been six months since you delivered your Nobel Lecture on poetry and politics, and six months since I first read it in the pages of The New Republic. My first reaction was one of mild disappointment, a sense of having been let down by…
The extreme compactness of biblical narrative is likely to strike almost any modern reader. Some, naively, will attribute it to the relatively rudimentary state of ancient literature that lacks the means to elaborate the details of the stories it tells. The last several decades of literary analysis of the Bible have shown that this is…
