by John Ambrosio

While it is a global phenomenon, people in the U.S., Europe, and other liberal democracies are living in the midst of a polycrisis, in a confluence of the intersecting and overlapping crises of rising authoritarianism and far-right populism, worsening climate and ecological disaster, the increasing likelihood of nuclear war, and the rapid development of unregulated generative A.I. Given this, how can people live with the unbearable knowledge of these threats, and with the overwhelming fear, uncertainty, and insecurity it necessarily produces?

Authoritarianism and neofascism are on the rise in liberal democracies around the world, propelled by mass migration, extreme wealth and income inequality, economic precarity, political polarization, and rapid cultural and demographic change.

The climate and ecological crisis is fueled by increasing global carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, the overexploitation of natural resources, and rapid biodiversity loss. The planet will likely exceed an average annual temperature of 1.5C above preindustrial times in a few years, which scientists have repeatedly warned will significantly worsen the already severe floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat linked to global warming and may trigger feedback loops and breach tipping points that could lead to uncontrolled global warming.

According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has been set at 85 seconds to midnight, the likelihood of nuclear war has never been greater than today. Some of the reasons for this include the Russia-Ukraine war; the conflict between India and Pakistan; the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran; North Korea and China increasing their nuclear arsenals; the expiration of nuclear arms control agreements between the U.S. and Russia; U.S. plans for a new missile defense system; the increase in global average temperature and deadly weather events fueled by climate change; and the increasing sophistication of generative A.I. to produce new weapons and disinformation campaigns. To this we might add the breakdown of the post-war international order. Read more »

by David Hoyt

When I set out to write this essay on the ecological aesthetic of a loose group of nineteenth-century French painters associated with the village of Barbizon, I did not anticipate that it would coincide with the largest wildfire to strike northern France in over a century. The fire, in the state forest of Fontainebleau which lies not forty miles from Paris, follows on a record-breaking heat wave. This summer’s heat is itself the latest in a succession of extreme heat events over the last few years, together with several years of severe drought. Other fires have erupted in the area, and several further to the south.

French forests are estimated to absorb ten percent of the nation’s annual CO2 emissions, but this ecological service is at risk of destabilizing in the wake of repeated drought and its attendant harms, such as arboreal diseases contracted by weakened trees. With such droughts becoming increasingly common in France as elsewhere in Europe, less water is available for tree growth, and less carbon is thus absorbed from the atmosphere. The impact of global warming can thus reduce a forest’s ability to mitigate global warming over time.

Of course, fire is a natural disturbance in temperate forests, especially oak forests such as the one at Fontainebleau. To look at Barbizon paintings of the woods from the 1830’s or 1840’s, one can discern a relative openness in the understory, together with a broad, expansive habit among the old oaks. It was the latter quality that so intrigued painterly devotees of the area, and which also indicates a long history of periodic burning. Oaks co-evolved with a regime of fire, which made them fire-resistant while the saplings of competing species were less so. Where fire is suppressed and a fast-growing understory is allowed to grow, slow-growing oaks are typically crowded out, and are unable to achieve the spectacularly wide, round form that distinguishes them. Read more »

by Swapna Liddle

What makes a city? What gives a place its distinct character? I think of the slogan ‘dilwalon ki dilli’ – the supremely banal play on words. It works in the context of Delhi only because of a happy conjunction of the word dil, or heart, with the Hindi word for the city – ‘Dilli’. It works also because it simultaneously tells us everything and nothing. Okay, people in Delhi have hearts; though this might be disputed by many who live precarious lives in this city, the marginalized, the victims of the violence the state and citizens alike often perpetrate on them. In any event, do people in other cities not have large hearts? Still, it is a catchphrase that makes those of us who live in the city feel good about ourselves. As Delhi’s most famous poet would have said, “dil ke khush rakhne ko Ghalib yeh khayal achchha hai” – it is a thought that keeps us happy.

Among such cliches about cities, Ananya Vajpeyi’s Place comes not so much as a breath of fresh air (another banality that I might myself have been tempted to use at another time!), but a rather stronger wind that carries away not just cobwebs, but also the superficial structures through which we think. An apt metaphor for the latter would be the many large, obtrusive, signs that sprouted around many Delhi neighbourhoods some time ago – ‘I ♥️ –––‘. Civic pride reduced to garish ‘selfie points’ in the absence of any real improvement in infrastructure and any transformation in the everyday lives of the people who live there. Another in a series of sarkari ‘beautification’ projects that are supremely ugly.

Clearing away the superficialities, Ananya shows us some familiar cities through a lens that is deeply personal and yet reaches into the essence of the place. Place, subtitled ‘intimate encounters with cities’ reminds us that the cities we inhabit are about the people we meet, the particular streets we walk in, the literature we read, and our own place within these large and diverse agglomerations of people and experiences. New York, Bangalore, Istanbul, Pune, Venice, Santiniketan, Chennai, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Varanasi, and Delhi, are places that figure in Ananya’s narrative. Each, inhabited and experienced at different points of times – in the author’s lifetime, but also at specific historical moments for that city and the world. Read more »

I’ve looked at Hair from Both Sides Now

I once had hair dark-brown and cumulous
Now more like cirrus-wisps, things are getting serious:
gone from dark and voluminous
it’ll soon be dissapearious

As I contemplate my pate
I’m thinking life’s mysterious
As I contemplate my fate
I’m thinking life is spurious

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by Eric Feigenbaum

In a sense, you could say Sir Stamford Raffles not only came up with the idea for Singapore, but also for Hong Kong. In the early 19^th Century, Raffles – the imperial strategist tasked with safeguarding British passage to and from China – realized the best way to fulfill his responsibilities was to eliminate the Dutch as a commercial and military rival along the passage from India to Malaysia.

During initial scouting missions, Raffles’ eye turned to Singapore as an ideal naval and commercial port, not only along the route from British India to Imperial China, but at a crossroads of international trade. In 1821, Raffles – with the persuasion of thinly veiled threats – signed a treaty with Malay leaders Sultan Hussein Shah and Temenggong Abdul Rahman giving a practically uninhabited Singapore island to the British Empire.

Taking the unprecedented step of making Singapore an Open Port – without tariffs or taxation – was the stroke of brilliance that truly launched the new colony and usurped the Dutch port of Malacca.

Raffles wasn’t personally involved in the British acquisition of Hong Kong Island following the First Opium War in 1841, but the Empire was taking the logical next step from the new playbook he introduced. A second island-based Crown Colony in the Far East secured Britain’s dominance not only over trade with China but over any other Western naval power with presence in Asia.

From that point, many observers loved to play “A Tale Of Two British Colonies” – usually drawing many parallels between Hong Kong and Singapore. At first glance, it seems obvious – two islands with predominantly if not exclusively Chinese populations, open ports, centers of both trade and naval power, free-market capitalism and most significantly, an organic synthesis of Eastern and Western cultures. Read more »

by David Winner

If anything useful comes out of the Jeffrey Epstein saga, it is that it gives us an example of pure evil with which to compare our lesser ill deeds. I’ve done some shitty things in my life, some secret, some observed, but only once was I subject to something like trial and punishment. Nearly half a century later, the incident serves as a kind of personal bellwether. This was me. This actually happened. I’m using some initials rather than names because I don’t want the players involved in the incident to google themselves and remember this eerie incident

Early in the 1990s, M, a kid I’d gone to high school with, smashed his car into a tree and died. Only a decade earlier, his life had also been in danger on a fateful tenth grade school trip up from Charlottesville, Virginia to New York City, and I and one other boy had been held responsible.

In the 1970s, my parents adopted the French/Italian tradition of allowing the child a small glass of wine at dinner, and actually several one evening when Ismail Merchant came over to dinner at my grandmother’s apartment and (ignoring my father’s side-eyed cautions) kept refilling my glass until I got drunk for the first time.

Drugs were a different matter. I only knew them through cautionary references on TV shows, and, after I started attending a progressive high school just outside of Charlottesville, by their whispered reputation. When Rory invited me to my first actual high school party in ninth grade, my mother (or maybe a cab) dropped me off in front. When Rory opened the door, I jokingly asked him where the “din of iniquity” was located. “The basement,” had been his matter of fact reply, and down a flight of suburban carpeted stairs, kids were drinking from a keg and puffing on peculiar cigarettes that smelled nothing like my father’s Marlboros.

That was the beginning of a beginning and the beginning of an end. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

This is not a piece about Carl Schmitt, but it does start with him. Unfortunately. In 2025, Schmitt was hard to miss, as James Traub chronicled in this excellent essay. For a while now, the democratic order has felt like the Weimar republic – flawed, fragile and possibly doomed. It seems only sensible to get acquainted with the political thinker who wrote most honestly, most mercilessly, most profoundly, about its weaknesses, in a time where the stakes were highest.

Schmitt, however, is not just the prophet of liberal failure; he wants to see it happen. Often, when he sums up the ills of modern parliamentary democracy – its party-politics, its banality, its political crises – he seems less a political philosopher than an angry pundit. He picks his abstractions and identities so that they associate the institutions and values of the Weimar republic with an enlightened rationalism that he loathes, and that he believes he can easily discredit.

The secret ballot, for instance, where each vote is counted and an “arithmetic majority” calculated? Pah! That, Schmitt knows, has nothing to do with the will of the people, which is of necessity public. The popular will can be known just as well or better by acclamation than by “the statistical apparatus that has been formed with such diligence over the last half-century”. Democracy simply demands that the law and the will of the people are one and the same. This has nothing to do with such unglamorous procedures as counting. The popular will can be expressed by a minority, or even by one individual.

Better people than Schmitt have been wrong about the secret ballot; John Stuart Mill had his reasons, which didn’t depend on disdain for numbers or on general-will-voodoo. But the contrast could not be larger. Mill’s impulses were liberal, democratic, and utilitarian, and he sought out tensions and contradictions between his ideals in order to face them and perhaps solve them. Schmitt, on the other hand, did exactly what illiberal propagandists are doing in our time: driving wedges between the popular will and democratic institutions, slandering the latter because they stand in the way between the people and some glorious national future. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On June 27, 2026, the hottest day recorded to date in Berlin, I emerged from the meagre shade of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral to make a run for it across Bebelplatz, on Unter den Linden in the city’s Baroque center. I had resolved to brave the punishing late-afternoon sun for a souvenir photograph of the skylight set into the middle of the square, which offers a view down into “The Empty Library” (1995), Micha Ullman’s subterranean memorial to the Nazi book burnings on that site on May 10, 1933.

I was in Berlin that weekend to attend a new production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio at the Staatsoper, also on Bebelplatz (about which more at a later date); to meet with a colleague from a partner institution with whom I will be co-leading an Academic Travel course this coming fall; and to visit Ulf, an old friend who has made Berlin his home for decades.

Since I met Ulf in 1990, when we were students at the Freie Universität Berlin, it has been our custom to exchange books on our birthdays, both of which fall in May; and accordingly, if belatedly this year, I had come from Zurich on that blazing weekend bearing a couple of volumes I was certain would interest him, given his professional and personal immersion in Jewish history. One was Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, Rachel Cockerell’s innovative 2024 account of her great-grandfather’s role in a plan to resettle Russian Jews in Galveston, Texas, in the years before the Great War. The other, older, weightier book was Effingers, by Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982).

Born in Berlin as Elise Hirschmann in 1894, Tergit took as her nom-de-plume an anagram of the word Gitter, German for “grill” or “bars” and, metonymically, for “prison.” Tergit, meanwhile, is a German word in its own right, an entomological term meaning the armor plating on an arthropod. Read more »

by W. Alex Foxworthy

A few years ago, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. For some time before that, one could see that his capabilities were declining, although the changes could still be attributed to age, retirement, or the narrowing of his circumstances. He had been a successful entrepreneur and consultant who worked with large companies across the United States and internationally. Then, over several months, and finally over a matter of weeks, the decline accelerated. I became directly involved in arranging his care and managing parts of his life that he had always managed himself.

I knew Parkinson’s in outline. It involved dopamine, the substantia nigra, tremor, slowness, and a drug called levodopa. When I was in graduate school studying to become a neuroscientist, I was presented with a number of facts about neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s. But for me, those facts did not amount to an intuitively satisfying explanation. They did not tell me why the disease begins, why it destroys some neurons and largely spares their neighbors, why replacing dopamine can seem miraculous, or why its consequences reach far beyond movement.

Though I have a background in neuroscience, I am by no means a Parkinson’s specialist. What follows is my attempt, as both a scientist and a son, to construct a simple and hopefully true picture of what is going on. The picture has three parts. First, a normally useful protein can enter a self-templating aggregation pathway. Next, the resulting seeds can propagate through connected parts of the nervous system. Finally, they do not affect every cell equally: they take hold most destructively where the cell was already operating with the least reserve.

This framework probably describes much of typical, alpha-synuclein-associated Parkinson’s disease, but it may not describe every biological subtype capable of producing the clinical syndrome we call Parkinson’s. Recent seed-amplification studies detect misfolded alpha-synuclein in most people with typical sporadic disease, but not in everyone diagnosed with Parkinson’s and not with equal frequency across genetic forms. The account that follows is therefore a model of a large and important part of the disease, not a claim that every patient arrives by one molecular road. Read more »

Train track in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

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by Eli Rarey

A poetry reading I recently attended at Clio’s Books in Oakland began with the poets and the audience all sitting in silence together for three minutes. Three minutes is a long time. None of the poems we heard took as long as three minutes to read. It was, you could say, the epic poem of the evening. Sitting in silence, known to many as “meditation,” is one of the foundational spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism. This literary event, called The Poetry of Zen, The Zen of Poetry, included poet Norman Fischer, who is also a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, as well as three other poets whom he had recently also ordained as Zen priests: Stefany Anne Golberg, Denise Newman, and Pearl Kan. A poetry reading with Zen priests who also happen to be poets.

At a poetry reading, we intend to listen to poets read poems. Silence is negative space. But at a Zen poetry reading, this relationship becomes unstable. Even the relationship between “poet” and “audience” becomes uncertain. Sitting in silence, there is no audience. If that silence is part of the reading, then the poetry of the silence is one of which we are all the author. As Pearl Kan said in response to a question about Zen and poetry, “I don’t think poetry is particularly Zen.” Poetry is about wanting to express yourself, wanting to make something. Zen is about releasing attachment to self-expression or definitions. Embracing doubt. That suggests that these poets’ work emerges from an expansive space of not-poetry, a field of silence from which they speak. Yet at this reading poetry and not-poetry were highly indistinct. Even this supposed opposition between Zen and poetry is itself in doubt. And doesn’t all poetry emerge from not-poetry? And isn’t that supposed opposition always in doubt? We imagine a poet as someone for whom the experience of their lives is somehow inherently poetic, in the same way we imagine a Zen priest as someone for whom the experience of their lives is inherently Zen. The poetry reading at Clio’s, appropriately, was not just a reading but also a kind of panel discussion about Zen, even a kind of absurdist performance art happening.

After we sit in meditation for three minutes, Stefany Anne Golberg calls out to the audience, “Question number one!” Someone responds immediately, calling back: “What is Zen?” This response comes from Susan Moon, co-author with Fischer of a book called What Is Zen. So Fischer’s answer to the question is to reference the book. Thus, the answer to “What is Zen?” is What Is Zen. Zen is difficult to define because Zen itself encourages us to doubt definitions and disrupt distinctions. As Fischer says, “The only thing that is not in doubt is that we doubt.” A poem follows, and then “Question number two!” Someone from the audience asks, “What is poetry?” In the same way that Fischer’s answer to “What is Zen?” is very Zen, the poets’ answers to “What is poetry?” are very poetic.

The poet/priests also offer canonical Zen koans for the others to respond to. This Zen practice I had not been exposed to before. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Charles Siegel

As I am writing this, the World Cup is into the quarterfinals. All in all, it’s been a great tournament so far. There have been many exciting, close matches. There was the brain-melting final 15 minutes of Argentina’s victory over Egypt. There have been several elimination matches decided in stoppage time, or extra time, or on penalties. There have been standout performances from the players you’d expect — Messi, Mbappé, Haaland and Kane — and also from lesser-known figures who have made themselves into new international stars, such as Denis Undav of Germany and Azzedine Ounahi of Morocco.

Most endearingly, there have been terrific performances from underdogs. The most surprising of all such stories, of course, is that of Cape Verde. As everyone now knows, this small island nation, population 530,000 or so, qualified for the World Cup for the first time — the third smallest country ever to do so. And they didn’t come just to make up the numbers. They progressed, incredibly, to the knockout stage, holding mighty Spain to a 0-0 draw, and drawing with two-time champions Uruguay and Saudi Arabia as well. In the round of 32, they lost to Argentina in extra time, on an own goal, but essentially they won. As one wag paraphrased the famous old headline in the Harvard Crimson, “Cape Verde beats Argentina 2-3.” Cape Verde’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, became an instant folk hero.

Spirits have been high all around. Away from the matches themselves, there have been endless stories about foreign fans and their wide-eyed, exuberant embrace of all things American. Lots of emphasis on food, especially. There have been stories about foreigners’ amazement at Mexican restaurants serving chips and salsa whether you ask for them or not, and not charging you for them, and bringing endless refills. (Although some of these stories are fake, as seems inevitable these days.) Here in Dallas, visitors have marveled at the barbecue, and the prehistoric size of beef ribs.

Beyond the food, foreigners are apparently surprised to find Americans so friendly and welcoming. There have been many reports about how visitors come here with preconceived images of our country, its truculence and xenophobia. But then they’re surprised to find that actual Americans aren’t like that at all. These stories are very pleasing to us, of course. They reassure us, make us feel we’re really not that bad. That we welcome strangers here! That our country is the big, capacious, friendly, magnanimous country we have all grown up thinking it is.

All true! But here is another truth: we are also cruelly, heartlessly unwelcoming. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

I first learnt of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its draft report on June 26, from a post in Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist, where he describes it as a clown show and as “a blueprint to end church-state separation.” Mehta is far too optimistic. The commission’s report is much more than that. The final report, we are promised, “will equip all Americans with the knowledge and support needed to defend their Constitutional rights.” The draft shows us what these words really mean. It contains recommendations that would greatly aid the Administration in its campaigns against independence of thought, suppress discussion of Palestinian rights, encourage proselytizing in the workplace, and grant protected status to conspiracy theories put forward in the name of religion.

There’s worse.

The very first recommendation reads

Instruct the Department of Justice to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.

There is so much wrong with this, that one hardly knows where to start. The Department of Justice is part of the Administration, and has no business issuing guidance on the “proper understanding” of any part of the Constitution, let alone the complex subject of church-state relations. The fact that the Commissioners, who include in their number influential scholars, prelates, and opinion shapers, were willing to put their name to this recommendation shows, more clearly than any other single recent event, that the United States as a Constitutional Republic is all but dead.

The strategy involved is obviously far beyond the mental capacity of the man who sits in the Oval Office, but fully in accord with the thinking of his entourage, and in particular of Russell Vought, whose 2022 article, Renewing American’s Purpose referred to the United States as “post-constitutional,” complained as an example about the role of career officials (remember that this includes all the scientists) in the Centers for Disease Control, and demanded that governmental activities be brought under strict centralized supervision.

The specific recommendations are very much as would be expected, given the choice of Commissioners, and lay out the plan to hold the MAGA coalition together in the approaching post-Trump era. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Chilly Morning, Boston, 2020.

Digital photograph.

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by Michael Liss

[M]en by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. —Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824

In the end, they were, like so many other citizens of this exasperating if often great and good land, men of impulse, of passion, of ambition and of regrets. Washington himself, a demigod in his lifetime, still left office soured by the partisan sniping, some of which was directed at him. Franklin, the twinkle-eyed inventor, patriot, diplomat, and elder statesman, one of the great figures of the 18th century, felt aggrieved over some attitude of Congress that he felt did not appreciate his point of view. John Adams, unceremoniously shown the door by the electorate in 1800, remained an outsider for the rest of his long life, periodically railing at the uncouth, the undemocratic, the unmeritocratic, and the uneducated. James Madison watched the beautiful Swiss-watch-like mechanism of his Constitution challenged by the reality of it being used by men who very often had little more than personal and tribal advancement in mind. And, of course, there’s Jefferson.

In Gordon S. Wood’s telling in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book, The Radicalism Of the American Revolution, this result was entirely rational. “A new generation of democratic Americans was no longer interested in the revolutionaries’ dream of building a classical republic of elitist virtue out of the inherited materials of the old world.”

Professor Wood died last month at 92, but left a legacy of scholarship (and honors) that few can match. Like probably every other history/political-science junkie in America, I had read Radicalism. I still had a copy, tucked carefully into the third space from the right on the bottom of the second shelf of the first big bookcase on your left as you walked into my study (in case you needed directions). Unearthed, it showed it had become a tad yellowed and a bit frail. It also looked like it needed to be re-read. Read more »