Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to history, to think anew, rather than be beholden to one’s oldest, fondest, but no longer…
Though democracy is ostensibly the opposite of monarchy, the mass culture that is American democracy has betrayed in every age a deep atavistic yearning for royalty. From the days of “King” Andrew Jackson to those of the “Kingfish,” Huey Long; from the era of the Robber Barons to the age of the movie “kings” and…
I was born in Dura, in the hills of Hebron southwest of Jerusalem, into a family that carries love for the land and the memory of loss with quiet dignity. My grandfather was a Palestinian fida’i (a martyr or “sacrifice”) who was killed by the Israeli security forces in 1978. I was taught the details…
My father was a librarian, an archivist, and a rare books collector. I grew up surrounded by books which were a hundred years older than I was nestled beside stacks of long-defunct short-lived Irish literary magazines, many of which were never digitized. My father would open his latest find to the copyright page, explaining why…
For nearly a decade, Clean House television host Niecy Nash would start each episode standing on a stoop or in a driveway to introduce “the show that rescues families from a cluttered home.” In a series of cuts rich with delightfully harsh commentary (“how did two little ladies make such a big mess?”) her team…
If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar…
Divination I God god god I heard the word rattling and buzzing in the cubicle of the elevator car, thwacking the walls and rebounding as it rode relentlessly up and down in the School of Theology every day, every evening, season after season; it escaped, too, down the fluorescently dazzled linoleum halls when the door…
“May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.” — Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, upon ordering a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at the conclusion of a Pentagon nuclear war game in 1983 For eighty years, the world has lived with the knowledge that a small number of…
In the spring of 2024 I taught a comparative literature class at Columbia University called Unland: Writing Utopias. The word Unland is a neologism of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, from his poem “Hawdalah” from 1963. Unland, in my reading, could refer to a decimated postwar geography that is no longer recognizable as itself. It…
Sometime during the year 1337, the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti began planning one of the most innovative works in the history of European art. Frescoed on three of the four walls of the executive council room of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, the painting is huge — almost twenty feet high and a hundred and…
If they show me stone and I say stone they will say stone. If they show me wood and I say wood they will say wood. But if they show me blood and I say blood they will say paint. If they show me blood and I say blood they will say paint. Translated from…
A boy is out doing a man’s work with a chainsaw, when his sister comes to call him in for supper. Suddenly, the chainsaw leaps and cuts deep into his hand. The boy looks at the bleeding gash and begs his sister, “Don’t let him cut my hand off— / The doctor when he comes.”…
