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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
January 15, 2025
In the more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the question of how art can respond to barbarism has taken on urgent significance. Theodor Adorno famously said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Today, in the aftermath of atrocities like Mariupol, artists in Ukraine have to ask themselves whether...
Read MoreJanuary 13, 2025
This essay is the first installment of Morten Høi Jensen’s Mannhood Sidebar Series on all things related to Thomas Mann, which will continue throughout 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth. On January 4, 1939, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig arrived at a stately, imposing home on 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New...
Read MoreJanuary 6, 2025
I enjoyed reading Katherine C. Epstein’s article “Historians Killing History” in the fall 2024 issue of Liberties, but as a fellow historian, I’d like to offer a friendly dissent. Epstein argues that the historical profession is currently suffering from a “collapse of scholarly standards” that has had grievous consequences, both for the field of history...
Read MoreDecember 23, 2024
In his latest column for The New York Times, heroically titled “Done With Never Trump,” Bret Stephens has saved historians hours of work. In just a few hundred words, he has demonstrated how a former Never Trump Conservative justifies defection. It is tempting to read the article as an exercise in hackneyed excuses, as if...
Read MoreDecember 18, 2024
1 Few works of art have captured the cesspool that is our social media public square as forcefully as this year’s “Red Rooms,” by Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante. The movie introduces us to Kelly-Anne, (played by a frightening Juliette Gariépy) whose life is governed by her own strict control, assisted by an AI she herself...
Read MoreDecember 16, 2024
It’s been a messy year. The future doesn’t look bright. Blue Sky beckons users to abandon X as if we still ahve agency to distance ourselves from Musk’s reach. For five days an assassin with perfectly coiffed eyebrows was on the loose, scattering Monopoly money behind him like a hoodied folk hero. People tut-tutting in...
Read MoreDecember 11, 2024
My favorite moment in the Kamala Harris campaign was when she gave a lengthy disquisition at Fordham University about how Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance can help the electorate better conceptualize the power of right-wing propaganda in a “post-truth” society. Even if Harris’s Derridean analysis represents the high-water mark of her electoral effort, it is...
Read MoreNovember 27, 2024
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.” Lucky rare Edna O’Brien, who died this past July at the age of 93, did both. She exploded onto the world scene in 1960 with...
Read MoreNovember 24, 2024
Michel Chaouli’s recent book “Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins” opens with a scenario familiar to anyone who has taught literature: he stands before a roomful of students, holding a book in hand (Kafka’s The Trial) and finds himself at a loss for words. The problem, it becomes clear, has nothing to do with...
Read MoreNovember 22, 2024
To understand bigotry, study the bigot not its victim. The exercise is a repudiation of the poison but it is also rational: bigotry is fostered, nurtured, and manifested by all manner of factors which affix to a victim – usually (but not always) a vulnerable one – but which have little to do with them....
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