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In this edition of Liberties ...
September 24, 2024
David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Despite the relative obscurity of even successful writers, especially those most regarded for literary fiction, Wallace continues to generate...
Read MoreSeptember 17, 2024
“[T]he ‘kids’, as the phrase goes, ‘got to me.'” Thus concluded Irving Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope. The book, which appeared in 1982, includes reflections on his conflicts with the New Left during the 60s. All through that decade Howe upheld the banner of democratic socialism, a socialism deeply informed by liberal values, against...
Read MoreSeptember 13, 2024
Print the legend On July 18, 1953, a painfully shy recent high school graduate walked into the Memphis Recording Service, a storefront studio perched at 706 Union Ave in Memphis. The outer office contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and 36-year-old Marion Keisker, who, among her many other duties, screened hopeful musicians who came through...
Read MoreSeptember 11, 2024
The presidential election of 2024 is in fact the unfolding of the rolling coup d’état that began in earnest four years ago. To imagine otherwise is to normalize what is patently abnormal and thus to falsify the crisis. It is to comprehend our politics as much of the political media does, clinging to shattered institutional...
Read MoreSeptember 5, 2024
In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. The king, Charles II, had made clear through his policies and actions that he sought to centralize control by establishing an...
Read MoreSeptember 3, 2024
The first time the drone strikes intensified it was just after Thanksgiving, and I was already a bit depressed to have celebrated with Crimean Tatar food rather than turkey and cranberry sauce. That Friday night, like the one before, air alerts were on for hours. This time felt different. My roommate slept in the hallway...
Read MoreAugust 28, 2024
The most precious object for a person trapped in hell is a means of navigation. This is true of physical misery and emotional or psychological misery, and it is true both literally and figuratively. Navigation is vital. Keep that in mind. If someone in Washington, DC, where I live, was tempted to visit the village...
Read MoreAugust 20, 2024
In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its museums; or perhaps...
Read MoreAugust 19, 2024
For well over a century, the favored metaphor for Balkan trouble has been fire. A cartoon from the eve of World War I depicts the Great Powers — Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary — standing atop a cauldron of boiling water, struggling to contain the “Balkan troubles” therein. A few decades before that, Otto...
Read MoreAugust 13, 2024
Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box...
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