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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
June 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...
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...
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