My subject is really three subjects that together constitute a single theme at the heart of American life. First, slavery itself — that form of human relations by which, for more than two centuries, white persons exerted unappeasable power over black persons as if they were tools or livestock. When speaking about this subject, I…
I am a direct beneficiary of the most successful social movement in American history. I am a gay man. Born in 1983 when a mysterious disease was beginning to decimate an earlier generation of gay men against a backdrop of societal indifference, I now live in a country where gay people can marry, serve openly…
For many years, professors of international politics have been telling us about the decline of the nation-state and the coming transcendence of the Westphalian system. But the political critique of the nation-state comes most often from men and women on the left, who condemn its parochialism, its tendency to produce nationalist fanaticism and xenophobia, its…
I Can one think of a more inauspicious time than now to offer a case for the continuing relevance, the necessity even, of the Enlightenment project to the fortunes of contemporary Africa? What follows is not a defense of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Where that is concerned, the great enterprise does not need my…
There’s only one time when you were perfect for loving in life, and if you miss that time, if you ignore it or pass it by, you’ve really missed something. James Salter I Autumn wind, the leaves a golden mash at our feet in the kind, quiet blaze of the streetlight; I am taking your…
On the day the Russians invaded Ukraine, Patol Moshevitz, a landscape architect and painter, woke early and looked out the window of his apartment on the fourteenth floor of one of the newest, most desirable buildings in the city of Irpin. He could see for miles in almost every direction: Kyiv, Bucha, most of Irpin,…
Thinking about extraordinary figures such as Goethe and Beethoven, one gets the feeling of observing in the distance two inconceivably tall towers. Their height seems impossible to calculate. What do they have in common? Where do they differ from each other? How harmonious is their architecture? Are there areas of dilapidation? Getting nearer, you can…
At this time two decades ago, President George W. Bush resolved to invade Iraq and topple its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. His decision was the most consequential American foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War, and arguably the most significant foreign policy action of the United States in the twenty-first century. As…
I An old theory has it that the most important architects of classical ballet have all been émigrés. In the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, when ballet became primarily an art of the French courts and acquired some of its enduring characteristics, it was shaped by dancing-masters and composers from Italy. The most influential…
1 Above deck, ice-scarred, off to Albion. ___ Let it be named so, for the dynastic furies combed into heads, pressed into lines of boys shouting ‘here, sir,’ and ‘not here, sir’ at devotion or on the parade ground, leaping over shadows as the sea broke with their names interred in the same roster,…
Six months ago, my yoga teacher decapitated his girlfriend. The police found her torso in the refrigerator of the RV he drove from New Orleans to Black Rock Desert every September for Burning Man. In this mid-size, decidedly regional Southern city — a site of national myth if not national importance — wars take place…
You will never be again What you never were before. Theodor Storm Every morning Odysseus sits on the beach and casts his eyes across the sun-freckled water. The breeze is fresh and the waves rumble gently as they break. He is crying. For seven years he has been a prisoner in paradise, the unwilling consort…
