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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
May 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...
Read MoreApril 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...
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