Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the…
My witchy hair so furious and alive stands up and crackles like a scratched 78 Galli-Curci singing from the moon Sempre libera! It’s an owl’s nest twigs and feathers and bones and rain a straw broom forgotten in a corner but still capable of spontaneous combustion so watch out. There’s joy in taking your final…
Behind us, centuries of child brides split open in childbirth peasants fleeing bent under sacks of grain small boys who hid in the outhouse when the soldiers came for the family. Every one of us a survivor of survivors. Ishmael waves as he floats by on a coffin. Even the one-eyed cat slinking off round…
We refused most emphatically to turn a patient who puts himself into our hands in search of help into our private property, to decide his fate for him, to force our own ideals upon him, and with the pride of a Creator to form him in our own image and see that it is good….
Dawn in Podil. The Jewish quarter of Kyiv from times past. March 21, 2024, sunrise and missiles over the Dnipro river — although it was impossible to see the sunrise from inside the bomb shelter. In a frame on my desk there is a scrap of paper that Václav Havel once left behind on a…
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…
