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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
December 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...
Read MoreNovember 3, 2025
In April 2024, a friend passed me a package. He had received it from someone who attended a debate I had with an Israeli academic in Taiwan, and that person gave him the booklet. I was living in Taiwan, four months past my mother’s death in Khan Younis. The package contained a booklet — stories,...
Read MoreOctober 27, 2025
What a strange and uncomfortable coincidence that the New York Film Festival has programmed one of its best line-ups during one of the worst years in modern American history. Filing out of any given screening, opening your laptop and checking your phone after hours in the dark, you might find soldiers advancing on American cities,...
Read MoreOctober 20, 2025
In the summer of 2024, I left my marriage and, with it, my house, my hometown, and my job. A year later, I had a new partner, a new apartment, and a new job. A seamless transition—except for the guilt, shame, and self-loathing that followed me from one life to the next. I soon found...
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