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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
December 22, 2025
Dr. Franz Kafka, as he is officially listed, is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery, about a mile down the road from where I live in the neighborhood of Žižkov. The greater Olšany Cemetery, which it adjoins, is across the street from my apartment. I often go there for walks in the evening, meandering along...
Read MoreDecember 15, 2025
In the heart of Tehran, beneath the surface of ordinary weekday routines, a quiet rebellion pulses through the city’s cultural veins. On a midweek evening in a subterranean bookstore everything seems perfectly ordinary, everything in its place. The clock ticks steadily towards half past ten and only a handful of customers begin to leave. The...
Read MoreDecember 8, 2025
The world has one remaining newspaper that prints its pages in both Turkish and Armenian. Its name, Agos, is a word used in Armenian and Turkish that means furrow, the groove in which one plants a seed. Like nearly everything else Armenian in Turkey, Agos makes itself inconspicuous — I couldn’t even find the paper’s...
Read MoreDecember 1, 2025
On September 9, the Munich Philharmonic inaugurated its 2025/26 season with the sort of solid, crowd-pleasing program that a major orchestra uses to set its tone for the year. From the elegant stage of the Isar philharmonic, the city’s new concert hall, the orchestra performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring the radiant Sol Gabetta, Schubert’s “Unfinished,”...
Read MoreNovember 24, 2025
Reviews of Love Me Tender (which premiered at the Cannes film festival last summer) describe it as a film about motherhood. This description is not inaccurate, but it is importantly limited. Love Me Tender is in part a story of two parents fighting over custody. Vicky Krieps plays Clemence, a mother struggling with a manipulative...
Read MoreNovember 19, 2025
A decade ago, on the first occasion that I ever heard Leon Wieseltier speak, he uttered a phrase that I have been thinking about ever since. Leon confessed he suffered from what he called “historical envy” because his mentors — giants like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Gershom Scholem — had fought epoch-altering battles for...
Read MoreNovember 17, 2025
How would a man write about a salmon? Abstract. Broad strokes. Shades of secondary colors: Pinks, teals, grays. Mirrors of himself. Fins moving independently to guide His naval journey. When the clear shock of Freshwater passes through his open throat Causing a mute bubble celebration To trail his path upstream towards metaphor, Towards the life...
Read MoreNovember 17, 2025
The wind passes by my father’s skin, leaving not a bruise but a memory. Yes, I admit: I am practicing grief. My father has died twice now by my count. I am practicing death, like a Buddhist monk bowing a hundred and eight times, knees touching the floor. This is devotion: rising,...
Read MoreNovember 17, 2025
My eyes tonight have no care for the careful geometries of these Southern houses. My hands are on the wheel and I can’t wipe my eyes. J’s out in the park chasing balls and girls, dirt and flesh fused together on his knees. Once, we wore shorts of the same neon blue. Or was it...
Read MoreNovember 10, 2025
Michel Foucault wrote that an essential element of authoritarian racism is “the administrative prose of a State that defends itself in the name of a social heritage that has to be kept pure.” If administrative prose is vital to the mechanisms of persecution and oppression from a predatory state, then it should be possible for...
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