Stunning as noon sun or psychosis aftermath, vase flung into the garden, but surely the porcelain was speaking and the mother, she couldn’t let it go on terrorizing the household, could she? White noise, attention span frail as a ghost crab clattering into surf, washed backwards into the mist of Ansel’s photographs, synth to soften…
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall surely reprove your fellow and not bear guilt because of him. Leviticus 19:17 “This last winter was another lost in fog. As usual he did nothing.” In this way A.B. Yehoshua introduces readers to the anonymous, plodding, intellectually undistinguished Israeli protagonist of his story…
Being implies obligation. …
February 20, Sunday Yesterday, at home in Kyiv, we listened to Boris Johnson’s speech and immediately bought tickets to Lviv. My husband Roman suggested a week ago that S, our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I stay with my parents in Lviv, but I refused, despite the American and British embassies having already relocated there (and my…
Why did the United States intervene in the Second World War? The question is rarely asked because the answers seem so obvious: Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and what more needs to be said? To most Americans, World War II was the quintessential “war of necessity.” As the late Charles Krauthammer once put it, “wars of choice,”…
What is a game? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously chose this nebulous concept to illustrate what he meant by “family resemblance,” where the individual members of a class can be determined to fulfill no necessary and sufficient conditions for admission, and instead only share some traits with some others in the class, others with others. Yet we…
1. three hundred nameless walk holding names behind their backs bone to bone muscle to muscle let us stretch their memory between our lines 2. saved by death from life name yourself mouth-holes stare 3. outside, it’s not death that whitens with bones in the leaves of trees you look closer but indeed, it is…
1 I wear a second-hand country a second-hand city apartment bed pillow blanket ability to walk across a park without checking under my feet without checking over my shoulder but Poland is not safe Lithuania is not safe Germany is not safe 2 I wake up from loud conversations behind the wall fuss jostling banging…
Dear Professor Legutko, Early this year, when Russians were positioning their troops along Ukraine’s borders and liberal democracies were debating what it all might mean, I started reading your books. I have heard that they are influential in Poland, and I am concerned about the weakening of liberal democratic commitments in our native land and…
War begets war: it is an old truism, and internecine wars — of the type twice fought on American soil — typically have their antecedents in prior wars. Consider our Revolutionary War, whose cri de coeur was “no taxation without representation.” But how often we overlook that Britain imposed these heightened taxes on the colonists…
Wait long enough and every enjoyment is eventually placed on the altar, gussied up, and sanctified. Rock ‘n’ roll lyrics were once a readymade source of ridicule, regarded as gibberish written by and for bubblegum brains and blasting out of transistor radios to drive mom and dad mad. The late-night television host Steve Allen, equipped…
I’ll admit to being biased here. Teaching a great books course at Columbia — I was a graduate student, my charges were freshmen — was the pedagogical experience of my life. I was never the same again, and I know that many of my students also weren’t, because they told me so, and because, decades…
