Volume 5 - Number 4 Explore this issue

Summer 2025 Issue

Explore this issue
explore all issues

Ian Buruma on staying decent in an indecent society; John Banville on Ireland’s poets and Ireland’s troubles; Sergei Lebedev on Putin’s road from Chechnya to Ukraine; Arash Azizi on art for art’s sake under Iranian oppression; Christina Cacouris on the style of grief; Lily Lynch on a rendezvous on the Bosphorus; Adam Kirsch on what one liberal learned from an evening of Ibsen; Declan Ryan on the uncanny achievement of C. K. Williams; Carlos Fraenkel on pain, happiness, and an ancient dispute; Jennie Lightweis-Goff on how Stephen Foster helped invent us all; Patrick Mackie on why Naples is the most musical city in the world; Abhrajyoti Chakraborty on the brutal genius of Saadat Hasan Manto; Justin Smith-Ruiu on the wartime career of analytic philosophy; Michael Kimmage on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s foolishness and profundity; Mischa Shuman on saying farewell to a cruel father; Greg Gerke contemplates Rembrandt at the Met; Morten Høi Jensen on why foreign students may never aspire to come to America again; Celeste Marcus reports from the West Bank on Israeli settler terrorism; and Leon Wieseltier on Trump’s moronic and dangerous war on culture. As well as poetry from Henri Cole and Paul Pastor.

You’ve read of free articles this month.
For full access to Liberties Journal, click here to become a subscriber today.

It’s like a meteor of intelligent substance that landed on my desk.

Thomas L. Friedman

A triumph for freedom of thought.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Liberties sure is needed in these times.

Bill Maher

Liberty is under threat and Liberties girds us for the fight.

George Stephanopuolos

Something was missing in our culture, and here it is.

Tina Brown

Invaluable.

David Brooks

Liberties: Some serious food for thought.

Christiane Amanpour

Liberties is THE place to be.

Wynton Marsalis

A murderers row of important, fortifying, and inspiring writers.

Aaron Sorkin

Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected. I am hooked.

Ralph Fiennes

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts — old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Required Reading with Morten Høi Jensen

Guy Stagg - The World Within

Guy Stagg joins Required Reading's new host Morten Høi Jensen to discuss his new book The World Within. On writing the book: "All my life I have dreamed of retreat. Of letting go each responsibility and cutting every tie. And I know I’m not the only one. But, when I learnt about the creative figures who left their lives behind, I began to ask myself: what is gained and what is lost when we withdraw from the world?"

Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

View All Podcasts



Liberties Sidebar

Sinners in the Hands of a Complete Unknown

by

August 27, 2025

Can the blues set you free? It’s hard to say, because, as you have probably heard from a reliable source whose play lists favor classic rock, “writing about music is like singing about architecture.” Meaning that it’s kind of pointless, because there are no words for what music makes you feel — you can explain...

Read More Read More

Rick Owens’ Exquisite Loneliness

by

August 20, 2025

The image of Rick Owens, the man, is conjured more readily than the image of Rick Owens, the brand of clothing. There’s the long, thin, ink-black hair; the platform shoes elevating his 5 foot 10 inch frame; the surprisingly chiseled physique, sometimes hidden under an oversized blazer (in black, of course). Few designers function as...

Read More Read More

Polanski’s Nation of Pain

by

August 11, 2025

The people who are willing to admit Roman Polanski’s greatness as a filmmaker invariably point to his earlier films — Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown — as evidence. In other words, the ones he made before he was charged for — and before he admitted to — the 1977 rape of 13-year-old...

Read More Read More

Dreyfus: An Affair for Our Lifetime

by

August 6, 2025

Alfred Dreyfus is having a moment.  This summer, French President Emmanuel Macron declared July twelfth a day of national commemoration for Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain whom a French military tribunal — in a notorious act of antisemitism — convicted of spying for Germany. Originally convicted in 1894, Dreyfus spent five years in a hellish...

Read More Read More

A Christian Friend’s Troubled Thoughts on Israel

by

July 28, 2025

In 2005, I somehow or other surfed my way to the website of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial, and there I found my political conscience. Up to that point, mine had been a politics of breezy, amoral abstractions. Universal emancipation — the project to which I was committed as a college and...

Read More Read More
Read more

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts ��� old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Required Reading with Morten Høi Jensen

Guy Stagg - The World Within

Guy Stagg joins Required Reading's new host Morten Høi Jensen to discuss his new book The World Within. On writing the book: "All my life I have dreamed of retreat. Of letting go each responsibility and cutting every tie. And I know I’m not the only one. But, when I learnt about the creative figures who left their lives behind, I began to ask myself: what is gained and what is lost when we withdraw from the world?"

Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

View All Podcasts



Log In Subscribe
Register now