“America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado.” So wrote George Santayana at the end of World War I. By a universal tornado, Santayana meant the creeds born of complete consensus that at times formed among Americans. In his day, they were the gospel of work and the belief in progress. Like tornadoes,…
Aside from asking how clothes should make you look, to which there are infinite and ever-evolving answers, women ought to ask themselves: how should clothes make you feel? Cocooned? Empowered? Beautiful? The truest expression of yourself? Do clothes make you feel any of those things? Of course, clothes are outer-directed and are always a presentation…
Speech evaporates on contact. Proud, meet shy, shy meet proud. Oh, you know each other already? A cast-off refrigerator spends whole days on the pavement, though it comes replete with a plug and wire. Or should that be plug and a lead. Probably it only needs a blub. Or a bulb. Who…
It was the day after your miscarriage when I was cleaning out our garage. A squirrel’s home. Enough nuts for a dozen scurries. They’d crammed them in every nook, piled them in boxes and drawers, stacked them on the scrap board atop the rafters. I almost felt bad until I remembered the old paint cans…
I recently visited Ottawa to give a speech to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Finance. I’ve visited a handful of times before, mostly for advocacy meetings on behalf of a national nonprofit organization. Ottawa has always struck me as a peculiar kind of city. The downtown core feels strangely lifeless, especially compared to…
I was a child and already a Zionist when Bill Clinton welcomed Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat to Camp David. My peers and I were inducted early into a particular understanding of the adult world, according to which lean, young, green-uniformed teenagers with M16s slung over their shoulders were all that stood between Israel and…
We are a little wearied, in fact, by the solemnity with which Mr. Osborn accepts the youthful mind and the youthful point of view. “Youth knows more about the young,” he says, “than old age or middle age.” If this were so, civilization would be impossible, experience worthless. TS. Eliot Cashing in on a thirty-year…
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…
