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In this edition of Liberties ...
December 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....
Read MoreNovember 20, 2024
Empathy with the victor benefits the rulers. ...
Read MoreNovember 19, 2024
When the anti-republican Action Française group wanted to incite a revolution against democracy in Paris in 1934, they chose to perform a “freely” translated version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about a tragic Roman tyrant. Coriolanus has plenty of useful material for the demotically agitating translator. Audience riots ensued. Both the socialists and the fascists...
Read MoreNovember 13, 2024
After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of art something has been gained for the human race and “the work of art transmits an...
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