February 24, 2025
Piotr Florczyk in conversation with Ange Mlinko, occasioned by the release of Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Mlinko’s collection of literary essays, out now from Oxford University Press. It seems the number of books in print increases every year — a condition which never ceases to surprise me; not long ago the demise of...
Read MoreFebruary 18, 2025
Over the past month and change, every day has brought some new and shocking change to the country where I was born. The mass pardon of domestic terrorists. Corruption charges dropped against the mayor of New York City, in exchange for cooperation with ICE. The explicit targeting of racial and sexual minorities, the resumption of...
Read MoreFebruary 11, 2025
Like always, my heart lurched when I stepped off the jet bridge and into Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. I’ve crossed the walkway to customs so many times over the past two decades and in that time the space has hardly changed at all. This time was no different. What was new was the surge of...
Read MoreFebruary 5, 2025
Minutes after the hostage agreement was signed between Hamas and Israel, the streets of the West Bank, several Arab capitals, and even some European cities echoed with chants celebrating Hamas’ “victory.” A “victory” paid for with the lives of at least 50,000 people, 110,000 wounded, and with the utter destruction of over seventy-five percent of...
Read MoreJanuary 27, 2025
Consciously at least, I meant to present myself in court on the fourth and last day of the first instance in 2022. I must have silenced my alarm while half asleep because I woke to a call from my lawyer. “Restez à la maison,” she said: “Stay home. It’s just the defense’s closing arguments.” I...
Read MoreJanuary 21, 2025
Thirty-five years ago, a Canadian named Ursula Franklin offered a dark prophecy. She predicted that unfettered technological development could strip us of the capacity to honor our fellow citizens’ very humanity. In such a world, she taught, democracy will become increasingly untenable — because liberal humanism is impossible to cultivate in a society dominated by...
Read MoreJanuary 19, 2025
Thousands of minutes and hours, deeds and words, specifications, delusions, mistakes without end, longing, flesh — it takes so much to create a single person — that he be, that he survives, that he feels a hand on his shoulder, that others say to him ‘It is you.’ And it is so easy for him...
Read MoreJanuary 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...
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