for Cassandre Berdoz Cassandra does not sing the fall of Troy, where Little Ajax raped her in the sanctuary. She does not sing her slaughter by Clytemnestra while Agamemnon beat his fists on the ground. From the tower of the Cathedral called Notre Dame, what Cassandra sings is the passage of time. She sings the…
It was just a B-grade submarine movie (or maybe all sub movies are B-grade), a vehicle for John Wayne, whose drawling virility I always resent, while Patricia Neal plays his ex-wife, though off-screen her lover Gary Cooper visited the set to try to persuade her to abort their fetus. And after all the khaki, depth…
For years I lived on the mountain, but I never drank from the high stream where it flashes over gray scree on its way down to the valley after percolating through the glacier that holds grains of carbon and pollen, maize and grasses, smoke, plague and famine, spores of fungus on the manure of cattle,…
It was almost vulgar the way that it was just so pronounced, how innocent they were. —photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 3.15.22 On the front page of the newspaper this morning, there was a photograph of a mother and her children killed by a Russian mortar round as they tried to flee across a ruined bridge. They…
The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old…
For Mario Vargas Llosa, a prince of our liberalism. With one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train For many decades I have participated like a good soldier in the war of ideas, by which I mean the application of philosophical notions to public affairs for the purpose of persuading readers…
The writer responsible for Job is the greatest of all biblical poets and one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world. He is a technical virtuoso, deftly marshaling sound and rhythm for expressive effects, at times deploying brilliant word-play — as when he writes, “My days are…
I take my title from the critic and literary scholar Simon During, who coined the phrase “cultural secularization” as a way of understanding the sharp decline in prestige — since the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the last decade — of the “high humanities.” The concept will strike many as evasively abstract,…
Yehuda Halevi Nine Poems Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141) was the Hebrew poet who culminated the startling period of Andalusian cultural production that Jewish history calls the Golden Age. In a moment of symbiosis in Islamic Spain from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, Hebrew poetry flowered as it had not since the Bible and would…
I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of…
In 1952, a year after I was born and a decade and a half before I became an active participant on the American left, Daniel Bell published a book called Marxian Socialism in America, the first serious scholarly examination of the subject. He considered, among other questions, why the traditional Marxist parties in the United…
It would be silly to call William Wyler underrated — he was one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful movie directors in American history. A staple in every American film canon, he was my favorite director long before I knew his name. Growing up I watched Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, and Jezebel…
