by Steve Szilagyi

Few topics in American history are treated with more solemnity than the Civil War. You could (as some men do) spend your entire adult life reading nothing but Civil War histories, arguing about tactics, and visiting battlefields, and never crack a smile.

Our scorchingly irreverent satirists don’t find anything funny about the Civil War; it hasn’t inspired absurdist comedy as the First and Second World Wars have, or spun off sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes or M*A*S*H. Even the gruesome Indian Wars generated a sitcom – F Troop – and dozens of insensitive movie satires.

Major Civil War films like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals tend to be as reverent as old-fashioned religious epics, or sad as hell, like Glory.

What most critics agree is the finest film about the Civil War, Buster Keaton’s The General, is nothing if not a comedy – but it’s a peculiar kind of comedy: as dark as a daguerreotype, with a star who never smiles, culminating in that massive train wreck, whose budget-breaking expense derailed Keaton’s real-life career.

“It is altogether fitting and proper,” as Abraham Lincoln might say, that the Civil War gets this kind of hats-over-heart respect. The gravity of the stakes, the awfulness of slavery, the complexity of the constitutional crisis, and most surely, the number of dead (620,000 at least), have combined, in the case of the Civil War, to temper the national tendency to jeer and make fun of anything anyone takes seriously.

So we might conclude that there is nothing to laugh at about the Civil War. But that would be wrong. Read more »

by TJ Price

In last month’s column, as in the month’s before, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which preceded that as well. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that there would only be two parts; the story rather took on a life of its own, and went to some surprising places—this is the third, and final instalment.) To those of you who have followed along with me to this point, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.

Please be advised that—in this instalment, as in the first and second—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.

5.
I did go back to school in the fall, as planned. My old roommate, Eddie, even stuck with me, and we were granted a spacious room to share on one of the top floors of the building, looking down over the entrance into the dorm itself. The summer had done things to us both, and in different ways. He came out to me fairly early on, and saved the grand reveal for a few months later, expecting it to be a huge surprise. Instead, it was met with a lot of amusement and laughter—what, you thought we didn’t know?—and nothing changed except for how he spoke in mixed company regarding his feelings for other men. I didn’t envy him. He did seem happier after he came out, though it was tempered with a bit of brittle arrogance, as if he had attained this fragile apotheosis of identity, and now had no time for those of us who still mucked around in the quagmire of confusion. His way forward was clear to him, and he had ever been goal-minded. From that moment on, it seemed he was making up for lost time. He became driven, and focused—I probably could have learned a lot from his hustle, if I’d been in the right place to understand it. Eventually, he and another musical theater major took up with one another, a guy that my roommate had apparently been completely enamored of for some time, but who had also felt uncomfortable with announcing his sexual preference (and who also, when he finally came out, was greeted by the same response we gave Eddie.) They seemed happy. They spent a lot of their time together. I think they eventually broke up, but for a long time they lived together, in an apartment off-campus. I even visited them once or twice, before we all faded away from each other, as photographs and friendships are liable to do.

I didn’t get to find out what happened to Ricky. The last time I saw him was that fall, in the top-floor room I shared with Eddie, busy with my own creative endeavors. I was writing a full-length play, a fictionalization (loosely) of my own awakenings as a college student, as a man who desired the company of other men but was repulsed by the urge, someone who couldn’t abide being touched. The play is interspersed with scenes held at a local coffee shop, during open mic sessions, in which the protagonist and his cohort of various artists take turns reading poetry, or speaking monologues. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Peter Topolewski

Doesn’t it feel like the extravagance of the Roman games rose as the empire stepped and then stumbled ever closer toward ruin? In fact, the grandeur of Roman entertainment peaked at the height of the empire’s power. Considering the spectacle of sport in 2026, the Roman example suggests we are living through the height of “Western” civilization. Perhaps for not much longer.

All around, you can see it without peering too hard: the Roman policy of “bread and circuses”, so named because emperor after emperor gave out portions of grain to the common people while also sponsoring entertainment to keep their minds from society’s troubles. The entertainment included gladiatorial games, chariot races, theater, public works projects, and festivals and religious celebrations with feasts, parades, and music. The troubles the people needed distracting from included poverty, inequality, corruption, military humiliations, and evaporating political rights.

These days the grain has evolved into a buffet of social programs, and shopping is now in that mix of entertainment. In fact, when it comes to bread and circuses, the most significant difference between days of old and today is that both the distractions and the problems come to us from governments and corporations—with the line between them getting fuzzier by the moment.

Plenty to rail about on this front, but for today it’s interesting that the Roman poet Juvenal first used the “bread and circuses” when complaining about how easily the common people forgot the bigger concerns in their lives and society. He was condemning, in his way, those who are so easily distracted. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

When I began to photograph the sky every day, the first thing I noticed is how quickly the sky changes. If I want to photograph a particular configuration of clouds, I need to go outside immediately, or stop walking to wherever I was going, and take the picture. Those clouds are probably on their way somewhere else, or busy forming or dissolving. The sky, so constantly present, is also the essence of the ephemeral.

I love being so enchanted with what I see out the window that I leap up and run out to take a picture. (And then I turn around and face the other direction and, as often as not, say “Oh!” and take another picture.) However, in general I tried to avoid chasing things. I do a lot of my sky-watching as I walk to the grocery store or the library or to see friends or family. Although I’m sometimes frustrated by human clutter that blocks an otherwise lovely view of the sky, I generally don’t like to search for a better place to see or photograph a particular sky—for example, to chase after a better view of a sunset. I don’t want to turn my love of the sky into a matter of obligation, of time pressure, of ought and should.

Sometimes I feel present and engaged when I’m photographing the sky, but at other times, taking pictures gets in the way of the actual experience. So I’ve formed the habit of sometimes just looking, of engaging only with my eyes and mind, not with my camera. Even if I want to, I can’t possibly photograph every cloud, every shade of blue, every change in the light, because the sky is so changeable. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light Breeze, Lincoln Center, June 27, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by Sean Murphy

John Williams’s Stoner is having a moment.

Or, it’s always been having a moment, but right now, in 2026, only more so. With the recent awareness that it was the monthly pick for the (amazing, awesome) Anthony Jeselnik’s Book Club, it seemed time to dive in.

You can usually tell you’re dealing with a cult classic—either unjustifiably obscure or egregiously overhyped—by how often it comes up in conversation. Over the years, I’ve noticed not only that Stoner is among a handful of books routinely mentioned, it’s never equivocal. Each person doing the recommending deeply loves the book and is happy to predict the ways it will change my life.

An observation about cult classics. Certain treasured works never capture the zeitgeist in part because they’re not easily identifiable with a particular time or place. Stoner, when it arrived in 1965, was describing a largely extinct America; to contemporary readers half a century later, Williams’s Missouri is as remote and unfamiliar as Hawthorne’s Massachusetts.

The most common and consistent accolades I hear or read involve the novel’s nuanced and loving portrait of a man whose passion—in this case for reading and teaching—transcends material wants. In our contemporary climate of social media, vapid influencers, and academic self-censorship, Stoner sounded like just what the doctor ordered, equal parts throwback and antidote.

And therein lies the rub. What disappointed me so immensely about Stoner is that I was predisposed to adore it. I’m the target audience; I’m that guy. A book about someone who loves art more than life itself? You had me at hello. I was, through the first half, disappointed and, by the end, astonished that this is the book, this is the character capable of changing lives. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Let’s get this out right away: I want to write about defecation.

It’s not the first time, I’ll admit. Some years ago I wrote an article about, of all things, a mathematical model for defecation. This was based on a 2017 paper I read with great interest. It had the fascinating title “Hydrodynamics of Defecation” and was published in a journal with the even more fascinating title Soft Matter. The researchers’ finding? That all mammals big or small take about 12 seconds to defecate.

As one of the authors commented, “The smell of body waste attracts predators, which is dangerous for animals. If they stay longer doing their thing, they’re exposing themselves and risking being discovered.”

Now let’s get this out right away too: most humans I know – mammals all, certainly – take rather longer than 12 seconds “doing their thing”. They are, of course, usually behind closed doors and not taking any particular risk of “being discovered”, or even attracting predators.

Yet there’s the rub: closed doors. Hold that thought.

Some years ago, I found myself in a tiny village in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. I had to spend the night, and it turned out the only place to lay down to sleep was the terrace of a local temple. It was actually a very pleasant night, breezy and quiet. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. —H. L. Mencken

Neoliberalism is doomed because everyone hates it. They are mostly wrong about the reasons they think they have for hating it. But explaining what neoliberalism actually is – classical liberalism updated for the era of big centralised government – only presents new and clearer reasons to hate it. For liberalism itself has always been a minority view: most people have always viscerally rejected the idea that other people – the wrong people – deserve freedom and rights. Its influence came not from convincing the majority of its principles, but from offering the arena within which more powerful political doctrines and cabals could safely compete with blunted weapons for a reduced prize. Now the political tides have turned back against moderation, and liberalism’s gift of proceduralist constraints has itself become the target of our rage.

I. Neoliberalism is not what you think you hate about it

The term ‘neoliberalism’ was successfully expropriated by the left shortly after its coining and now functions in public, political, and academic discourse as an exonym: “a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it” (Moira Weigel, quoted out of context). The left’s success here has been so great that almost the only people talking about neoliberalism these days are those trying to explain why they hate it.

On the one hand this means that there is near universal agreement that neoliberalism is terrible and should be overthrown. On the other hand, there is rather less agreement about what neoliberalism means and hence what needs overthrowing – except that it has something to do with capitalism and controls the world somehow. In the absence of opponents willing to call themselves ‘neoliberal’, everyone is free to make up their own version of neoliberalism to hate. Activists and academics have created dozens to hundreds of different theories of neoliberalism as projections of their pet peeves about what’s wrong with the world and what should be done about it.

Naturally these theories contradict each other. After all, they aren’t about the same thing. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Last month I found myself navigating the alleyways of Amsterdam with a cluster of college students. We marked the canals as we passed. We took note of a house with an outdoor garden on one block and an unusual roof line on the next. As we emerged from one alleyway we saw in the distance something for which we were not looking but that we were thrilled to find—a statue of Spinoza standing like a sentinel guarding the city he once called home. We were not searching for Spinoza, but we found him.

In Plato’s dialogue, Meno, the titular character raises what is now referred to as The Paradox of Inquiry. He argues that inquiry is impossible because either we know what we are looking for or we don’t. If we know what we’re looking for, we don’t learn anything when we find it. If we don’t know what we’re looking for, we won’t recognize it when we see it.

When my husband and I decided to take our students on a study abroad to Paris and Amsterdam, we hoped to lead them down a particular path of inquiry. There were specific things we hoped they would find. We called our course “The Enduring Enlightenment” and we hoped the students would, in their travels with us, come to understand the intellectual origins of the emancipation of human thought. Read more »

by Derek Neal

A few weeks ago my dad was telling me about a man named Chalk-Eye. This man, whom my father had never met but had heard stories about from his own father, was a local legend in the small coal town of Williamson, West Virginia. You might see Chalk-Eye, my dad said, in the pool hall or at the fieldhouse for a high school ball game. Maybe he’d be walking along the railroad, or thumbing a ride into town. He was always around. One time, my dad’s father told him, they were driving up to Cincinnati for a Reds game. They spotted Chalk-Eye by the side of the road and asked him if he wanted to come along; he did, so he got in the backseat and made the impromptu four-hour trip with them. Chalk-Eye was also—and this is corroborated by a newspaper clipping—the friend of the great baseball player Stan Musial, who starred for the St. Louis Cardinals from the 1940’s to the early 1960’s.

When the Cardinals were in town to play the Reds, Musial would provide Chalk-Eye with complimentary tickets and put him up in a hotel. There were other local figures in Williamson: Firebird Matthews, who could be hired for a day to do any physical labor needed; Roy Dibble, who sold “The Grit” (the local weekly newspaper); Jimmy Castle, who could paint but who might not be available because he was in jail. I wonder if these people exist anymore. Somehow, a place had been found for them in society; they were not gainfully employed, couldn’t hold down a 9-5 job, might not be able to fulfill the role of a husband or a father, but they were not completely destitute or alone either. The town took care of them one way or another.

Michael Bible’s novel, Little Lazarus, is about these sorts of people. A recurring character is “the man in the seersucker suit,” who is not just one person, but a social role that is taken up by anyone who puts on the suit:

He is a wayfarer, a traveler. A common sight in that part of the country until not that long ago. Some were buskers or magicians or living statues. Some were confidence men or hustlers or thieves. Others were mystics and professional raconteurs. The man in the seersucker suit wasn’t any of these. He was more of a stroller. In another time and place he might’ve been called a flaneur or a penniless boulevardier. Harmony nicknamed him Seersucker. He and his tortoise Lazarus moved from town to town predicting the future.

Throughout the novel, we meet a series of Seersuckers who take us through the 20^th century: James, Simon, Andrew, Thomas, and finally, Francois, who brings us into the 21^st century. Other Seersuckers are briefly mentioned: John, Peter, “and so on and so on…The Seersuckers were men and women from every race and background.” It becomes clear that the individuals themselves are not so important; instead, it’s the idea of the Seersucker, and while reading you feel that, although you might not be a Seersucker, there’s a part of you, and a part inside everyone, that could become a Seersucker if life plays out a certain way. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

There’s a question that’s been eating at me the last year or so: When did reading become so performative?

Maybe it’s always been this way: Something makes you look smart or sophisticated, so you want people to see you doing it.

This need for some kind of social acceptance is deeply rooted in us from birth. But with the internet, reading (or more specifically, being seen reading) sometimes feels like it’s reached a fever pitch:

• People posting their latest book haul.
• Social media accounts with names like “Hot Guys Reading.”
• Pictures snapped of giant thousand-page novels (always with post-it notes sticking out).

It makes reading feel less like something you love for the sake of it, and more like something you do to influence what other people think of you. And even worse than the performative part?

People expecting your opinion to fall in line with theirs.

Like if you read a certain book and didn’t like it, you just didn’t get it. To give you a concrete example from my own life: I recently read The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Everybody told me it was one of the best books ever written. That it was a shining example of literature done right.

That I was going to looooooooooove it. Well – I didn’t. At times, I didn’t even like it.

Every character was one-dimensional, the count was a bit of an asshole, and the plot had far too many side stories that just seemed irrelevant. Silly me.

I should have kept this opinion to myself.  Read more »

An early morning view looking east from the train station in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

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by David Hoyt

Reading the Boghossian report on current state of the humanities in American higher education I was, as I am sure were many others, struck with a sense of déjà vu. Relativism versus realism, an irresponsible academic left versus a scolding academic right, even the same malefactors singled out, as if a cold case from the 1990’s had been exhumed by a prosecutor determined to win the conviction that had escaped them years ago. A few admittedly cringe-worthy declarations of the subjective basis of all thought, together with Inquisitorial assertions of a single truth as the measure of all knowledge lend the document a theological tenor. And as history shows, theological debates tend to conclude only when both parties exhaust themselves and the terms of the debate are somehow shifted. Until this happens, skirmishes such as this one will probably continue to flare up along an ontological front drawn a little more than a century ago, in the context of similar cultural battles, and on either side of which stand opposing models of language.

Those opposing models, based on a then-emergent “ontological Yalta” (the phrase is French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s) between the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture, a sort of Great Divide between Nature and Spirit, emerged across an axis running between Vienna-Prague and Paris-Geneva at the turn of the 20th century. They shared a similar negative relation to the intellectual world of the previous hundred years, as well as a certain methodological orientation emphasizing logical coherence freed of and independent of historical determinations. The study of language, which had underwritten the historicism of the 19th century on the basis of comparative grammar, was being reworked and tested for its potential to provide a theoretical framework for the practice and meaning of science itself.

In light of the Boghossian report’s concern with what it claims is the politicization of scholarship in the humanities, it is important to recognize that what took shape in Saussurian linguistics and the philosophical enterprise of the Vienna Circle in the first three decades of the 20th century were two explicitly political projects. Read more »

by John Ambrosio

In 1984 when Ronald Reagan was re-elected president of the United Staters I asked myself: how is this possible? How was it possible that an ignorant but affable B-rated actor who continually confused his role in Hollywood films with historical reality and his own experience, and whose mental capacity was clearly on the decline, get re-elected president? How did his “Morning in America” campaign advertisement, a vision of a mostly white America imbued with traditional values, religiosity, and patriotic nostalgia, and his promise to “make America great again” by restoring a 1950s idealized and fictionalized past, convince voters to re-elect Reagan in a landslide?

I ask myself a similar question today: how could a convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault, and who incited a mob of his supporters to try to violently overturn a free and fair election get re-elected president of the United States? More than 77 million Americans, a slight majority of voters, supported Trump despite his deranged rants, racist rhetoric, and his relentless attacks on immigrants, the judiciary, journalists and the mainstream media, transgender people, and the “enemy from within.” How did a grifter, con man, failed businessman, and Mafia don, who promised to “make America great again” by deporting immigrants and lowering prices, persuade voters to re-elect him?

While there are numerous theories that seek to explain these electoral outcomes, there is something deeper going on here that is not captured in the conceptual and analytical frameworks typically employed to analyze national politics. It is the ocean in which we all swim, the ambient condition that underlies contemporary political life and the particular forms that ideological conflict takes in the U.S. today.

Wendy Brown, the renowned political theorist and author of Nihilistic Times, provides a different way of thinking about and understanding our current predicament. She argues that the rise of anti-democratic populism, extreme political polarization, and post-truth politics in the U.S. is a consequence of pervasive nihilism. Not nihilism understood as “an individual attitude of darkness, despair, or cynicism in which nothing in the world, including life itself, is thought to have meaning,” but as a symptom of a deeper problem stemming from a “historical, cultural condition of modernity specific to the crumbling of religious authority spurred by the Enlightenment.”

In other words, Brown argues that the rise of reason and scientific truth, what Max Weber calls the “disenchantment of the mysteries of the world,” has displaced religious and traditional authority as the foundation for values, but “it cannot replace what it destroys.” That is, science can “tell us how things work,” but it cannot tell us “how we should live,” what we should value, or why we should value it. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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