January 26, 2026
Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s parents met for the first time at a dinner given for Thomas Paine during which Wollstonecraft argued with Paine so passionately that the guest of honor could...
Read MoreJanuary 19, 2026
1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the German High Command had set a new task: a mad rush to the North Sea, and the all-important ports of...
Read MoreJanuary 12, 2026
In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it on a violent nuclear-armed state. The early results are already catastrophic: between 350,000 and 470,000 killed, at least 130,000...
Read MoreJanuary 6, 2026
In November 1952, C. Vann Woodward gave the presidential address at the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association, titled “The Irony of Southern History.” He was paying tribute to, and was deeply influenced by, the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s just published, now classic essay, “The Irony of American History.” And I’m paying tribute to...
Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Her dresses rebel in the dark lagoon. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. Anguish in silks, sequined by the moon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. The waves a dirge: too soon, too soon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Henry jabbing, stabbing each black balloon. The...
Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Most of his body is lost except for parts of a leg, a foot, some toes. Her head’s turned slightly left, still centered on the place where he climbed up on her knee to bless the animals. Empty now as her womb, the small hole drilled in her chest for...
Read MoreDecember 22, 2025
Dr. Franz Kafka, as he is officially listed, is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery, about a mile down the road from where I live in the neighborhood of Žižkov. The greater Olšany Cemetery, which it adjoins, is across the street from my apartment. I often go there for walks in the evening, meandering along...
Read MoreDecember 15, 2025
In the heart of Tehran, beneath the surface of ordinary weekday routines, a quiet rebellion pulses through the city’s cultural veins. On a midweek evening in a subterranean bookstore everything seems perfectly ordinary, everything in its place. The clock ticks steadily towards half past ten and only a handful of customers begin to leave. The...
Read MoreDecember 8, 2025
The world has one remaining newspaper that prints its pages in both Turkish and Armenian. Its name, Agos, is a word used in Armenian and Turkish that means furrow, the groove in which one plants a seed. Like nearly everything else Armenian in Turkey, Agos makes itself inconspicuous — I couldn’t even find the paper’s...
Read MoreDecember 1, 2025
On September 9, the Munich Philharmonic inaugurated its 2025/26 season with the sort of solid, crowd-pleasing program that a major orchestra uses to set its tone for the year. From the elegant stage of the Isar philharmonic, the city’s new concert hall, the orchestra performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring the radiant Sol Gabetta, Schubert’s “Unfinished,”...
Read MoreNovember 24, 2025
Reviews of Love Me Tender (which premiered at the Cannes film festival last summer) describe it as a film about motherhood. This description is not inaccurate, but it is importantly limited. Love Me Tender is in part a story of two parents fighting over custody. Vicky Krieps plays Clemence, a mother struggling with a manipulative...
Read MoreNovember 19, 2025
A decade ago, on the first occasion that I ever heard Leon Wieseltier speak, he uttered a phrase that I have been thinking about ever since. Leon confessed he suffered from what he called “historical envy” because his mentors — giants like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Gershom Scholem — had fought epoch-altering battles for...
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