July 13, 2026
In 2004 my wife Kathy was diagnosed with dementia. Over the next eleven years we learned it was likely Alzheimer’s. On March 6, 2015 she died of congestive heart failure. During those eleven years of Alzheimer’s I kept a journal of our lives and our coping. After she died I continued keeping the journal, but...
Read MoreJuly 7, 2026
The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben Gvir, to IDF Chief of Staff Major General Eyal Zamir, to the head of the IDF’s Central Command General Avi Bluth,...
Read MoreJuly 6, 2026
How much time do we have? That’s always the question — the one the disciples fumbled on the mount, the one my portfolio answers nightly in its decimals. I’m the managing partner. I have come to talk about the Antichrist. I find I must begin with blood. Not mine — let the record...
Read MoreJune 29, 2026
It is a very unhappy birthday for the American Republic, to say the least. These days, barely a week goes by when Franklin’s admonition upon leaving the Constitutional Convention “ — if you can keep it” doesn’t echo in the mind. As the inauspicious sestercentennial approaches, the summer is already shaping up to be a...
Read MoreJune 22, 2026
To Posterity When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards And reading and even speaking have been replaced By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste They held for us for whom they were framed in words, And will your...
Read MoreJune 15, 2026
Thrust into time and space, everybody enters in medias res. What had come before? Readers, as Trollope noted long ago, prefer the cart ...
Read MoreJune 8, 2026
In loving memory of Irwin Berl Nadler, 1952-2023 There are moments — small, almost absurd moments — when one realizes that one has crossed a threshold, a personal, religious, historical, or intellectual threshold — without quite noticing the warning sign on the door, or even the door. Mine came in the form of an...
Read MoreJune 1, 2026
I This year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened on a rare sunny winter’s day in the German capital. In the early afternoon of February 12, the international jury, led by its president Wim Wenders, filed into the Grand Hyatt for the opening press conference. Film festival veterans are used to these tedious rituals, the lazy...
Read MoreMay 25, 2026
Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and Flaubert scholar (who drew on the methods of the Cahiers du Cinema critics of the ‘50s in...
Read MoreMay 18, 2026
What do we want from our idols? Devotion to their ideals, of course, a keen sense of self-mythos, preferably an exalted capacity to live as they preach. On a cursory glance, Jack Kerouac appears to meet these standards. The Buddhist Years, a collection of Kerouac’s previously unpublished drafts, diary entries, poems, and scribbles, excavating his...
Read MoreMay 11, 2026
How many great women painters have been honored by history? In 1948, the writer Edward James claimed there were just seven female masters: Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosalba Carriera, Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Angelica Kaufmann, Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot. It was a relatively new phenomenon to have a successful woman artist, he wrote, thanks...
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