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In this edition of Liberties ...
June 4, 2025
If anybody truly lived in Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” world, it was us. We were the first children of the new Czech democracy, born in the 1990s, at the end of the century which subjected our country to two world wars and totalitarian oppression. And my generation knew none of that. Our history was...
Read MoreJune 2, 2025
Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students enroll in a course whose title is something like “Principles of Comparative Politics” or “Introduction to Comparative Government.” These are bread-and-butter courses for any modern political science department, but they aren’t the flashy or sexy ones. Students who study government and political science normally come to these...
Read MoreMay 28, 2025
I visited Manhattan during Labor Day Weekend, 2001, and then returned that November to find the area barricaded by plywood walls, and the walls fliered with the pictures of missing people. Two years later a boiling dread roiled the March of 2003, as America’s futile and illegal invasion of Iraq had become inescapable. Years later...
Read MoreMay 26, 2025
A painter and a businessman, an emigre and an epicurean, W. Dieter Zander was an oddity typical of the shifting currents of the midcentury; his collection of six hundred lovingly preserved restaurant menus at the New York Public Library is a monument to everything he sampled course-by-course during his mouth-watering life. However, the menus are...
Read MoreMay 21, 2025
Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as...
Read MoreMay 19, 2025
“The worst is over,” Thomas Mann wrote to Herman Hesse on December 22, 1932. “The madness seems to have passed its peak, and if we live long enough we shall witness happier days.” Mann was referring to the Nazi political threat and was of course soon proven sorely mistaken. And yet he actually had good...
Read MoreMay 14, 2025
Two oceans can be said to defend the United States. There are also the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, outposts of security and pivot points on the U.S. Navy’s map of the world. The American territory not bounded by water is bordered by countries with no reason and no will to invade: Mexico,...
Read MoreMay 7, 2025
Jamieson Webster treats psychoanalysis not as a static body of knowledge but as something to be tested, stretched, and reimagined. A practicing analyst, she is also a professor, writer, and public intellectual whose work pushes the field beyond the consulting room. She has collaborated with artists, written for general audiences, and even performed in plays....
Read MoreMay 5, 2025
I teach sculpture to college students. More specifically, I am a graduate student in the United States teaching “Introduction to Sculpture” to undergraduates at a state university. On my resume it reads “Graduate Teaching Associate,” although this is a misleading title as there is no oversight. Nor do I have any collaborative association with the...
Read MoreApril 30, 2025
Even by the depressing standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, April 2002 was a hopeless time. The peace summits of the 1990s had faded to memory and scores of Palestinians and Israelis were regularly killed in terror attacks and military operations. The United States, which had exerted so much effort in the peace process, was by...
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