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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
April 25, 2025
I A penny saved, heads-up, one, shiny buttercup, its tiny face value sunned with luck such that you stoop to pluck it—kids’ play, fair return due— is a penny earned. II Money doesn’t drape herself on fair limbs, float her wealth of long stems— green affair, lush, moss laces— put...
Read MoreApril 23, 2025
Last week, Harvard challenged the Trump administration’s threat to deny billions in federal funds unless the university bent to a list of far-reaching demands. Harvard’s legal counsel struck a measured but unmistakably defiant tone: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” In a separate...
Read MoreApril 21, 2025
Last month, Liberties assembled a number of specialists on regions or communities plagued by despotic leaders for a conversation on Zoom. Respondents were asked to respond to the question “How do despots in your respective countries or in the regions and eras you study use loyalty as a tool to enforce obedience?” What follows is...
Read MoreApril 18, 2025
It was in Mexico City in 1990, at a conference organized by Octavio Paz to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from defeat in the Peruvian presidential elections, denounced Mexico as a “perfect dictatorship.” It was a shocking moment. The word ‘perfect’ said so clearly that the Mexican regime...
Read MoreApril 16, 2025
A viewer seeing Caspar David Friedrich’s work for the first time may be surprised by the easy-going delicacy and directness of his painter’s touch and by the way he draws. Now the subject, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of his first full retrospective in the United States, this early-nineteenth-century artist’s very name can conjure...
Read MoreApril 7, 2025
“At the very least, I will die rejecting what has happened and what is still to come. Maybe I’ll be killed by an Israeli airstrike, or maybe Hamas will kill me — but I will die standing against this madness,” Fadi, one of the demonstrators who took to the streets of Gaza on Tuesday, March...
Read MoreMarch 31, 2025
Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation...
Read MoreMarch 26, 2025
The slick marble walkway between the tarmac and passport control at Ben Gurion airport was lined with poster after poster of missing, returned, or dead hostages. Still wobbly from hours on and off planes and in various layover airports, I walked past their smiling faces beside numbers marking the days since October 7, 2023, photographs...
Read MoreMarch 24, 2025
Fashion, my mother always told me, is a reflection of the sensibilities of the time. The designer Christian Dior, whose hourglass silhouettes revolutionized post-war fashion in the 1940s, called it “ephemeral architecture.” And yet, too often fashion is written off as a frivolity, an apolitical or politically clueless display of ostentation. It’s no surprise, then,...
Read MoreMarch 17, 2025
Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction...
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