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In this edition of Liberties ...
September 2, 2025
The Palestinians have been waiting for a state for a long time. Recognizing the State of Palestine, as several European countries have chosen to do in the recent weeks, is about much more than politics — recognition itself confers dignity. After decades of sacrifice and suffering under occupation, Palestinians long for a future rid of...
Read MoreAugust 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 MoreAugust 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 MoreAugust 18, 2025
There was probably no better time for Thomas Hart Benton to write his autobiography than in 1937. An Artist in America describes the artist’s life and thoughts, his tumultuous place in the art world and plans for further glory with a bravado that could have been conjured only by an artist at the top of...
Read MoreAugust 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 MoreAugust 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 MoreJuly 30, 2025
(The political journalist Sol Stern, who started on the left and moved to the right and ended up a liberal, died on July 11, 2025 at the age of 89. He left this essay unfinished when he died.) As a journalist I have written about Israel and the many threats to its survival for more...
Read MoreJuly 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 MoreJuly 23, 2025
Americans don’t really talk about decadence. To the extent that the term has figured in conversation over the last few decades here, decadence has been invoked not to describe life in the US, but in Western Europe. It’s the “great” states on the continent — Germany, France, and the UK — that American pundits periodically...
Read MoreJuly 9, 2025
There’s a quote I’m fond of, falsely attributed to Lenin, that “ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” It was in fact coined by Gorky, and as with so many misattributed phrases, it is also misquoted. I had always quietly reordered the line in my mind, preferring to have aesthetics in the first position, and...
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