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In this edition of Liberties ...
September 3, 2024
The first time the drone strikes intensified it was just after Thanksgiving, and I was already a bit depressed to have celebrated with Crimean Tatar food rather than turkey and cranberry sauce. That Friday night, like the one before, air alerts were on for hours. This time felt different. My roommate slept in the hallway...
Read MoreAugust 28, 2024
The most precious object for a person trapped in hell is a means of navigation. This is true of physical misery and emotional or psychological misery, and it is true both literally and figuratively. Navigation is vital. Keep that in mind. If someone in Washington, DC, where I live, was tempted to visit the village...
Read MoreAugust 20, 2024
In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its museums; or perhaps...
Read MoreAugust 19, 2024
For well over a century, the favored metaphor for Balkan trouble has been fire. A cartoon from the eve of World War I depicts the Great Powers — Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary — standing atop a cauldron of boiling water, struggling to contain the “Balkan troubles” therein. A few decades before that, Otto...
Read MoreAugust 13, 2024
Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box...
Read MoreAugust 11, 2024
“We must stem the tide of malice,” Mary Bennet says to her sister Elizabeth after they learn that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, has run off to London with Mr. Wickham, “and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.” Elizabeth can only “[lift] up her eyes in amazement” at this...
Read MoreAugust 7, 2024
My family left Capri sipping cordials. Aboard the skipper, alongside us, was a young couple from the Southeastern U.S. The husband chatted up my father. He was in his late thirties, working as a financial broker-dealer in North Georgia, and feeling the ceiling. His own zip and zeal, he felt, were underfoaming, and the rural...
Read MoreAugust 5, 2024
Now you’re telling me You’re not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague — Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust” I In the autumn of 2018, I received from an estranged family member in Vienna some documents once belonging to my great-grandmother,...
Read MoreJuly 29, 2024
My face mask is strapped wrong such that the yellow bands strain awkwardly on the back of my skull, bunching up my hair into a silly-looking poof, but I don’t notice because there’s a whirring machine in front of me, looping a pad of gray foam in quick circles, ready to brush something. I am...
Read MoreJuly 26, 2024
You can trust my characters. Whatever else they are — and they’re not always nice — at least they’re upfront. They don’t hide anything. They scream, laugh, cry, jump around and get drunk. But our society makes people into hidden people — stiff upper lip, keep quiet, don’t show it. I suppose if there is...
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