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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
April 2025
Last month, Liberties assembled a number of specialists on regions or communities plagued by despotic leaders for a conversation on Zoom. Respondents were asked to respond to the question “How do despots in your respective countries or in the regions and eras you study use loyalty as a tool to enforce obedience?” What follows is...
Read MoreApril 2025
It was in Mexico City in 1990, at a conference organized by Octavio Paz to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from defeat in the Peruvian presidential elections, denounced Mexico as a “perfect dictatorship.” It was a shocking moment. The word ‘perfect’ said so clearly that the Mexican regime...
Read MoreApril 2025
A viewer seeing Caspar David Friedrich’s work for the first time may be surprised by the easy-going delicacy and directness of his painter’s touch and by the way he draws. Now the subject, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of his first full retrospective in the United States, this early-nineteenth-century artist’s very name can conjure...
Read MoreApril 2025
“At the very least, I will die rejecting what has happened and what is still to come. Maybe I’ll be killed by an Israeli airstrike, or maybe Hamas will kill me — but I will die standing against this madness,” Fadi, one of the demonstrators who took to the streets of Gaza on Tuesday, March...
Read MoreMarch 2025
Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation...
Read MoreMarch 2025
The slick marble walkway between the tarmac and passport control at Ben Gurion airport was lined with poster after poster of missing, returned, or dead hostages. Still wobbly from hours on and off planes and in various layover airports, I walked past their smiling faces beside numbers marking the days since October 7, 2023, photographs...
Read MoreMarch 2025
Fashion, my mother always told me, is a reflection of the sensibilities of the time. The designer Christian Dior, whose hourglass silhouettes revolutionized post-war fashion in the 1940s, called it “ephemeral architecture.” And yet, too often fashion is written off as a frivolity, an apolitical or politically clueless display of ostentation. It’s no surprise, then,...
Read MoreMarch 2025
Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction...
Read MoreMarch 2025
Once upon a time, democracy excited the American imagination. When Thomas Mann toured the United States in the spring of 1938 with a lecture on “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” his audiences averaged somewhere between two thousand and seven thousand people at a time. In New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, Chicago,...
Read MoreMarch 2025
The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second administration have been characterized, among other things, by an obscene display of policing power, one that has largely alarmed liberals because it appears completely lawless. One of Trump’s initial acts was pardoning and commuting people convicted of crimes related to January 6, including some who had injured...
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