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MARIANNE 1960 GOOD GREEK COFFEE GRECIAN WOMAN STUDY MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 1 JUST TO HAVE BEEN MY FIRST WIFE MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 2 MONTREAL VISITOR NO. 1 VIBRANT BUT DEAD
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence
MARIANNE 1960 GOOD GREEK COFFEE GRECIAN WOMAN STUDY MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 1 JUST TO HAVE BEEN MY FIRST WIFE MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 2 MONTREAL VISITOR NO. 1 VIBRANT BUT DEAD
Does liberalism have poems? Are there liberal poets? John Stuart Mill, who loved Shelley and who celebrated “human feeling,” thought so: “Although a philosopher cannot make himself, in the peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made poetry…
For paradise to be possible either the lion must lose his nails, or the lamb must grow his own. HANS BLUMENBERG Before setting out to Moriah, where he intends to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son, Abraham loads the wood into Isaac’s arms and carries the burning torch and a sharp knife himself. On…
Poetry can sometimes offer to the young a piercingly accurate formulation of their inchoate suffering. I remember reading, at twenty-three, two lines in a new book: For to be young Was always to live in other people’s houses. Perhaps some poet had said it before, but if so, I hadn’t come across it. I learned…
In 1945, Columbia University published an obscure treatise by Jean Bodin, which originally appeared in 1566, as part of its “Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies” series. Bodin was a theorist of absolutism, but one who had a profound influence on later natural rights thinkers, and this was his first work, translated from Latin by…
Among the great longer poems of the twentieth century, the circumstances under which Shaul Tchernikhovsky’s To the Sun was composed were perhaps the most unlikely. This sonnet cycle was written in Hebrew in war-torn Odessa in 1919, with Red and White forces struggling for control of the city. Tchernikhovsky, then forty-five, had served on the…
Over the past year, there was so much to be afraid of that fear itself grew fatigued. Was the solitude of lockdown passing into a new systemic withdrawal? Or were we practicing turning our blind eye to kids on the streets with guns? Nothing felt as eerie then as the bourgeois comfort that now at…
The language of art is embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal — it is neither a sob-story nor a confidential whisper. LINDA NOCHLIN What makes an artist great? For the duration of the cultural drought that engulfed the plague year, as the rates of…
For Tom at seventy in Zion Sergio Sierra was born in Rome in the winter of 1923. When he was twenty-six years old he received rabbinical ordination, after which he assumed a rabbinical post in Bologna, where he assisted in the reconstruction of the shattered Jewish community. The embers of history’s wildfires had not yet…
“How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a light bulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “You wouldn’t know. You weren’t there.” In the American military, identity is an enduring obsession. Long before debates swirled through cultural institutions about the value of hyphenated American identities or the relative fixity of gender-based pronouns, the…
I The Thousand Year Reich had come to an end after twelve bloody years. The “belated nation,” which had drawn the short straw when it came to dividing up the overseas colonies of the world and so colonized inwards with the expulsion and destruction of the Jews (this was the writer Heiner Müller’s thesis), had…
There is a passage in Democracy in America in which Tocqueville observes that in a mass of land spanning the width of the continent and extending from “the edge of the tropics” in the south to the “regions of ice” in the north, “the men scattered over this area do not constitute, as in Europe, shoots of…