Shortly after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe traveled to York Springs, a village in Pennsylvania, to visit with his deceased father’s kin. W. O. Gant, the father of the novel’s protagonist, was modeled by Wolfe on his own father, William Oliver Wolfe. In a letter to his mother in North Carolina, Wolfe recounted…
You may call my love Sophia But I call my love Philosophy Van Morrison Philosophy always buries its undertakers. Etienne Gilson The only thing worse than spurious metaphysics is spurious warnings about metaphysics. It should be obvious that the farther one moves away from the physical, the greater the likelihood of fancy; but that is merely…
In the epochal summer of 2024, The New York Times decided to remind everybody who was boss. It had hesitated long enough; now was the time for action. It tensed its stringbean muscles, firmed its collective brow, and dedicated its full editorial resources to prying a sitting president from pursuing reelection, its columnists, political reporters,…
1 The United States and its democratic allies face serious, and possibly existential, challenges that appear in three manifestations: external, internal, and technological. First, the democracies collectively face a rising group of authoritarian nations loosely centered around China, which seek economic and technological supremacy in the coming century. Internally, the United States and others face…
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…
In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7, the subsequent congressional hearings with university presidents, and the encampments that followed, academia has once again found itself at the center of the culture wars, from which it rarely strays far. On one side, critics denounce universities for “wokeness,” while on the other side, defenders…
Act One: Berlin and Prague Immanuelkirchstrasse 29 is a short walk from my house in Berlin. The five-story corner apartment went up in the early years of the twentieth century, when Prenzlauer Berg was a mixed-class district of workers and upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, the façade suffered damage in…
Suddenly a cry flew out of nowhere, like the lash of a whip, piercing and sharp, waking us from a troubled sleep — furious — “Tell me, have you all gone mad? Giving up on all this? Just like that, despairing already, Without a real fight?” “Leave us alone,” we said. “Let us withdraw into…
I saw The Exorcist not long ago, probably the bravest thing I have done in a while. The movie terrified me the first time around in 1973, and it did the same fifty years later. This time it got me thinking about possession. It made me wonder if milder forms of possession — no projectile…
It’s strange, how life can sometimes mimic literature. Consider the story of Jonathan Keeperman, which in crucial ways recalls American Pastoral. Like Philip Roth’s novel, it is a story of how mad ideas can take hold when history unsettles familiar normative coordinates, and when children confront a more dimly lit world than the one faced…
When we first met, you said you hoped to write a place as yet unwritten, maybe here, the last of the café’s lunch crowd clearing out with a soft ceramic clink and spray of light through glass to glaze your dark cascade of hair. It’s not Manhattan, after all: it’s not a place for public…
The last time we ever spoke Missouri suburbs filled with snow and snowfall blotted out the oak beyond your buried patio. You’d never see another spring. Falls . . . confusion . . . vertigo . . . Familiar landmarks vanishing, you stood up from your wheelchair. Where did you think you were going? Across…
