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In this edition of Liberties ...
July 23, 2025
Americans don’t really talk about decadence. To the extent that the term has figured in conversation over the last few decades here, decadence has been invoked not to describe life in the US, but in Western Europe. It’s the “great” states on the continent — Germany, France, and the UK — that American pundits periodically...
Read MoreJuly 9, 2025
There’s a quote I’m fond of, falsely attributed to Lenin, that “ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” It was in fact coined by Gorky, and as with so many misattributed phrases, it is also misquoted. I had always quietly reordered the line in my mind, preferring to have aesthetics in the first position, and...
Read MoreJuly 2, 2025
“When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where [drawings] by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)] were exhibited, I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This is what Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote to his brother, Theo, in June 1875, about one...
Read MoreJune 23, 2025
A woman in her late fifties, dressed in a black chador with a small sun hat, accompanied by her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter — a girl of about four or five years in a white floral dress — journeyed to Tehran to spend the Nowruz holidays away from the hustle and bustle of the pilgrimage...
Read MoreJune 18, 2025
For many people, a country is a source of identity: a constant, a flag, a constitution. But what happens when you live through a revolution? What happens when your life cracks open at history’s fault line? Since the fall of Assad six months ago, Syrians have been engaged in deep, wide-ranging conversations about the future...
Read MoreJune 16, 2025
My family and I are victims of this bloody conflict. Please help us find a safe way out of Gaza and save my family. Please share this message. This short plea was written on a battered phone from a makeshift tent in one of Gaza’s displacement camps — by someone whose only wish is to...
Read MoreJune 11, 2025
The protests that erupted across Los Angeles in response to the Trump administrations draconian immigration policies did not come as a surprise. After all, Trump’s policies were designed in part to stoke terror and fury. It was surprising, though, that the President chose to deploy seven hundred marine officers and 4,000 National Guard soldiers in...
Read MoreJune 9, 2025
All matter doesn’t matter. Which is hard to believe when two years I sat wedged in a corner office stapling papers and prying them open. I was used to it. Used to compiling edge to lascivious edge. At week’s end I went to the cask like everyone else. What I inhaled was the body asking...
Read MoreJune 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...
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