by Charles Siegel

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines. It lives on, four centuries after it was written, on countless t-shirts and coffee mugs. People who have never read another word of Shakespeare know the line well, and think that Shakespeare hated lawyers and that his audiences hated them too. That facile reading, however, is wrong.

Shakespeare used lawyers frequently, as both a plaintiff and defendant, and moved freely in legal circles. His first residence in London was near the Inns of Court, where affluent students lived and studied law, and he had friends and relatives in the Inns. It thus seems unlikely that Shakespeare hated lawyers or held them in contempt. But it is the context in which “let’s kill all the lawyers” appears that most tells us what it really means.

The line is spoken by Dick the Butcher, the henchman of Jack Cade. In Henry VI, Part 2, the boy king has returned from France, and rival factions from the Houses of York and Lancaster are struggling for power. The Duke of York hires Cade, a commoner, to foment rebellion. Cade tries to rouse a crowd of people, and Dick chimes in:

JACK CADE: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,– as king I will be,–

ALL. God save your majesty!

JACK CADE: I thank you, good people:– there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

DICK: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Shakespeare is saying that lawyers are what stand between order and chaos, between respect for individual rights and mob rule. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens agreed, writing in a 1985 opinion that “a careful reading” of the scene that shows that “Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”

Today Donald Trump and his minions aren’t trying to kill lawyers. But he does seek totalitarian government, and he certainly wishes to dispose of lawyers, and the rules and norms, the rights and processes, that they guard. Read more »

A stained-glass window in a wall on the other side of this chapel in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, seen through a stained-glass window on this side.

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by Akim Reinhardt

On a hot summer evening in Baltimore last year, the daylight still washing over the city, I sat on my front porch, drinking a beer with a friend. Not many people passed by. Most who did were either walking a dog or making their way to the corner tavern. And then an increasingly rare sight in modern America unfolded. Two boys, perhaps ages 8 and 10, cruised past us on a bike they were sharing. The older boy stood and pedaled while the younger sat behind him.

They faced a very mild incline and moved slowly as they talked and laughed with each other. To me, it seemed almost idyllic, a visage from a different era. Then my friend said, “I feel sorry for those kids. It’s like their parents aren’t paying attention to them.”

When I was a child playing with my friends, I think the very last thing I wanted was my parents paying attention to me.

My friend is a Baby Boomer, and like me, has no children. He and I grew up in eras when children did exactly what these two were doing: play outside without adult supervision after school, on weekends, and during the summer. It was so common and normal during our childhoods that absolutely no one questioned it. And didn’t he, like I, have fond memories of that? Of course he did, he admitted. So why, I asked, was he pitying these kids for doing the same thing?

“Wellll,” he thought aloud, searching for an explanation, “things are different now.”

They certainly are. For starters, childhood has never been safer. Bike helmets and playgrounds atop soft padding instead of blacktop are just two small examples.

But the elimination of many dangers is not the only thing different today. Parents are also different. Or at least the middle class ones are. For let’s not fall into the trap of having the middle class stand-in for a nation at large, even if politicians and the press constantly promote this misrepresentation, which erases tens of millions of Americans who are poor, work and commute excessively, and don’t have the wherewithal to over-parent their children. Whereas middle class parents can find a combination of time and resources to ensure their children are chaperoned and overseen pretty much 24 hours a day. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

The smell of Thai Boat Noodles always reaches to the parking lot. As you walk further into the Weekend Food Market at the Wat Thai of Los Angeles, whiffs of fish sauce, shrimp paste, garlic, frying rice noodles and more start to chime in. But always the Boat Noodles.

“This smells like Thailand!” my eleven-year-old son said the first time I took him last year.

Of any country I’ve ever visited, Thailand by far has the best developed and varied street food scene. Like my son said, the smells are both strong and recognizable. In Bangkok  there are streets, back alleys, parks, bus stations and train depots that could vie for best “restaurant” in the world if they were somehow formally organized. During the time I lived in Thailand, I used to consider the Southern Bus Terminal my favorite buffet because of the combination of food carts and vendors.

In Thailand, delicious food is cheap and ubiquitous. It also makes for messy streets and back alleys – which are the heart of Bangkok neighborhoods. Sidewalks can be overtaken by food sellers with their makeshift tables and stools. Food vendors often occupy narrow lanes in alleys and interfere with the flow of traffic even on main roads. Thai culture has a high tolerance for disorganization many Americans might consider near-chaos.

Every Southeast Asian country has street food and the disorganization it brings to streets and sidewalks. The food is a treasured part of their cultures and also a major convenience. Good, healthy, tasty food at a reasonable price can be steps from your home or business.

In 1965 when Singapore achieved independence, it was no different from its neighbors. In fact, it may have rivaled Thailand for an incredible and chaotic street food scene. Singaporean street food not only features the many specialties of its major constituent cultures – Chinese of numerous regions, Malay and Tamil Indian – but as one might expect of a multi-cultural island, people began experimenting with fusion. A little Malay spice in a traditionally bland Chinese noodle dish…. An Indian-inspired curry sauce to accompany a Malay staple…. Fish head curry becoming a national dish. Same with pepper crab and laksa.

Singaporeans loved their street food. Only their government hated that it was on the street. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rafaël Newman

If I were asked to name the creed in which I was raised, the ideology that presented itself to me in the garb of nature, I would proceed by elimination. It wasn’t Judaism, although my father’s parents were orthodox Jewish immigrants from the Czarist Pale, and we celebrated Passover with them as long as we lived in Montreal. It certainly wasn’t Christianity, despite my maternal grandparents’ birth in protestant regions of the German-speaking world; and it wasn’t the Communism Franz and Eva initially espoused in their new Canadian home, until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact put an end to their fellow traveling in 1939. Nor can I claim our tribal allegiance to have been to psychoanalysis, my mother’s professional and personal access to secular Jewish culture, although most of my relatives have had some contact, whether fleeting or intensive, paid or paying, with psychotherapy—since the legitimate objections raised by many of them to the limits of classical Freudian theory prevent it from serving wholesale as our ancestral faith, no matter the extent to which a belief in depth psychology and the foundational importance of psychosexual development informs our discussions of family dynamics.

No, our house religion was social democracy.

Our family commitment to sexual and racial equality, socialized medicine, decolonization, and government regulation of the market was manifest, of course, in a geographically and historically conditioned form: in electoral loyalty to the NDP, Canada’s mainstream progressive party, founded in 1932 as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and renamed the New Democratic Party in 1961. Our family credo held that the Liberal Party of Canada, known as the Grits, might look progressive enough, but their instincts would always be pro-business; any socially progressive policies they may have championed had been forced on them by their marriages of parliamentary convenience with the New Democrats. As for the Tories, Canada’s Conservatives, they were simply out of the question for progressives: it’s in the name. My choice of the NDP in the ballot box, when I came of voting age, was thus at once more, and less, than a deliberate commitment: it was a reflex, almost an instinct. It was second nature.

My first proper induction into retail politics was at the age of 14, several years before I was eligible to vote; and it involved working on a by-election campaign for the local NDP candidate in our Ontario riding of Broadview. Before we moved east to Toronto, from the Vancouver suburbs where we spent the mid-1970s, I had already twice ventured into political activism: once visiting a meeting of the local Trotskyist cell, where I was amazed to encounter my high school French teacher; and once at a rally for divestment by Canadian banks in then-apartheid South Africa. (This is not counting my fabled instrumentalization as an infant, when my mother protested the sale of Californian grapes at our local Steinberg’s grocery store in 1960s Montreal, holding me aloft, like Andromache for extra pathos, as she cited Cesar Chavez and the NFWA.)

Now, in 1978, freshly arrived in our new home in east-central Toronto, I was encouraged by my parents to volunteer in support of Bob Rae, who would go on, at 30, to win his first federal seat for the NDP that October and would remain a member of parliament for over two decades. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Aerial composition, March, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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A Cornucopia of Elegies

as clear as time when the air was green
and tenderfeet knew the ballet of beginning,

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by Christopher Hall

Despite writing my doctoral thesis on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, a work most notorious for its poorly optimized optimism, I am something of a natural pessimist. Pessimism is at the right moments a potent tool for clarity (as is, even I have to admit, optimism, though not surprisingly I think this is the case more rarely), and so it is disappointing that the moment when I could have used it the most, my generally bleak perspective on things failed me. During my Masters, the professor who would eventually become my thesis advisor told me that, given the pathetic job prospects, a Ph.D. was not a good idea. Well, in your mid 20s, no obstacle, current or future, seems like it can become an indurated part of your fate if you choose for it not to. I was neither ambitious nor greedy, and I was willing to work anywhere for peanuts; so, the jobs would be there. Well, they weren’t, and in the midst of massive writer’s block and a crisis of faith concerning what literary criticism actually does, my prospects for an academic career tanked. I’m not sure if I can accurately say “I should have listened” as I am gainfully employed in a place where my degree is nominally required. But I don’t teach literature. And the writer’s block quickly metastasized into reader’s block; I still read, of course, but the urgency is gone (and the multiple distractions of the internet age are not helping.). Ah well, there are worse things, etc., and what does one want with being “well-read” anyway?

I suppose the actual question I’m wondering about is why I ever thought I could make being well-read a career. As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation.

But I am allergic to any argument which is centered in the “use” of the humanities, at least if we understand “use” purely in the sense of “useful.” The disjunction between the “use” of the STEM disciplines and the “uselessness” of the humanities means that the world will stand study of the sexual habits of the pink fairy armadillo, not necessarily because it might lead to some new patent or product, but because it seems to be the price necessary to pay to keep science “going.” There can be no such argument for a study of sexual politics in Middlemarch. And the attempts to provide a “use argument” for the humanities have all, to my mind, fallen flat. “The humanities make you a good critical thinker;” is there any discipline out there that advocates for naivete among its practitioners? Hopefully there are not too many engineers out there taking everything they see at face value. “The humanities make people better democratic citizens;” well, if reading Rochester, Beckett, Byron and other assorted depressives and nihilists have made me a better citizen, I am not aware of how. Read more »

by Chris Horner

In daily life we generally get by without invoking explicit moral positions or judgements. This is because, for the most part, the norms and taboos of the quotidian life are just embedded in what we do or say. This isn’t to say we all adhere to them all the time – far from it. But when we see such behaviours our responses will range, according to seriousness, from tutting to calling the police. At one end we have the norms and taboos of basic politeness, at the other the serious stuff about harm. But this mainly happens without anyone needing to invoke an explicit moral a code, since our responses are embedded in the ‘ethical substance’ of everyday life.

But there are times when we may ask ourselves whether a norm or taboo or a rule is right. We seek justifications. Then we might ask about the consequences of following a rule, or of the red lines that might mark real moral obligations and limits. Things that appear as  ‘common sense’ can turn out to be abhorrent – it was once ‘common sense’ to think that women shouldn’t be educated or that some races were ‘obviously’ superior to others. So, we need to be able to critically reflect. Even then moral philosophers like Kant and JS mill are unlikely to come up. It’s more likely to be the ‘Golden Rule’ (do unto others as you would have them do unto to you) or the ‘what would happen if we all did that?’ Such reflections conduct have their place. We should reflect on what we do, and maybe change it, or call for change.

But everyday ethical life isn’t based on such things. It is the other way around: moral talk is rooted in ethical life, most of which happens without much reflection. We don’t go around with propositions about morality ‘in our heads’, as it were. We just live our social lives. Moral maxims and theories are reminders of what we should consider, what matters, and we reach for them we when feel stuck. Explicit ‘moral talk’ is parasitic on that other stuff of everyday life – the practices and institutions that we don’t put into question most of the time, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. Read more »

by O. Del Fabbro

Why do we fight? That question has been asked by so many in the history of mankind: philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political theorists have come up over and over again with explanations as to why humans fight.

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy at the University Massachusetts Boston, and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center, has in his recent book publication tried to answer that question in his specific, and very unique way: Glory, Humiliation, and the Drive to War.[1] Eisikovits’ main claim is that glory and humiliation are similar to a “two-stroke engine”, that is they are in “conjunction with each other”. To put it more simply: being subject to humiliation is so injurious that ending or reversing that state results in obtaining glory. The cycle of the two-stroke mechanism between glory and humiliation is what keeps the war machine running.

Until recently the German political scientist Herfried Münkler would have disagreed with Eisikovits. Especially Westerners live in post-heroic times according to Münkler. Drone warfare and more generally hybrid warfare allow societies to wage war without being explicit about it, and more importantly, there is no need for heroes anymore, if battles are fought remotely. Only lately, with the integration of drone warfare in classical warfare in Ukraine, has Münkler taken a step back and self-criticized his earlier statements. Eisikovits for his part is spot on, when he highlights how psychologically challenging remote drone warfare is for the pilots, and how they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).[2] Münkler believed that times had changed, that because wars in the 21st century are fought with new technologies and societies are more peaceful now, heroes are no longer needed and glory is of no importance anymore. Eisikovits proceeds the other way around. Wars might have changed technologically, but the drive to war has not changed. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

“…another kind of net, that language, the one the world gives us to cast so that we might catch in it a little of what it is and what we are, and we are, among other things, the poverties of the language we inherit.”  Robert Hass, “Families and Prisons,” What Light Can Do.

These days when night and cold come so soon one wants nothing more than to huddle around a fire, read for awhile, then go to bed – but the world has its obligations.

I was walking the dog in the cold night air, almost remembering what I wanted to remember, and then it came to me, the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s “Araby.”

The first time I read it was magic, the feel and look of the winter air, the awareness of the intensity of one’s aliveness in it, and Mangan’s sister:

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Yes, the paragraph described me too, though I was far in time and space from “dark odorous stables.” (Actually, there were some old stables around where I lived then, used for garages for awhile, but now mostly storage sheds filled with mysterious things.)  

Then I remembered the girl next door, a year or two older than I who had once been the babysitter for me and my brother, but when I had caught up a little bit, passed puberty, and we were both going to high school, she walked ahead of me all the way while I shuffled behind and never said a word. But I certainly thought of her in my own way. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

This book is essential reading or anyone who is trying to make sense of what is happening in America (and, alas, in much of the rest of the world) today. It traces the intellectual roots of Trumpism back to its fascist (or perhaps more accurately Nazi) roots. It anatomizes the extraordinary coalition of the superrich and the disaffected that has made the Republican Party what it is today, explores the contribution of apocalyptic religion to the cult of Trump, and details the organizational networks that hold this coalition together. Most disturbingly, it shows that Trumpism is a symptom of a much larger and more deeply rooted phenomenon that will not disappear with Trump. More encouragingly, it points to inherent contradictions within the coalition that may yet prove its downfall. Finally, it urges those who value democracy to be active and organize at all levels. To which I would add, join a Union. It is the Faculty Union, not the University Administration with its $52 billion endowment, that is fighting Trump’s attempt to seize control of Harvard. [Update: the University has now rejected Trump’s demands.]

The author has been studying the phenomenon she describes here for over 15 years, and has written two earlier related books. This one manages to cover an enormous territory, from which I can here only present a few impressions, with a large cast of actors, combining together detailed discussion of organizations and arguments with firsthand accounts of political and religious gatherings, and the sometimes colorful biographies of many of the leading characters. It is as close to being an enjoyable read as the subject matter permits, skillfully navigating its complex narratives through some 250 pages of text, backed up by over 700 references, most of them with web links.

The book appears to have gone to press after Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, but before he took office. Its analysis helps make sense of the Trump regime’s most extraordinary behavior, such as its fondness for spreading measles, its assault on the academic and governmental research base that has served the US economy so well, its betrayal of Ukraine, and the Orwellian rewriting of American history that un-persons or sidesteps people as diverse as Colin Powell and Harriet Tubman. In each case, we can with the aid of the book understand what is going on. Simply put, Trump is an accomplished mafioso, and rewards his power base. The book does not however prepare us (how could it?) for the full impact of Trump’s own megalomania and erratic policy-making.

I have only one slight criticism, which may perhaps merely reflect my own interests. There is little discussion of the connections, dating back to before 1980, between biblical creationist organizations and the doctrinaire illiberal Right of which Trumpism is the latest aspect, or of the links that have been forged between these organizations, with their theological and pseudoscientific denial of climate change, and leading right-wing political think tanks. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra 

“How are you?” asked my aunt about a year ago in my living room in New Delhi, her tone languorous and inquisitive, her gaze perched on my face. Having recently moved back to India after about 28 years in the U.S., this deceptively simple question both thrilled and discomfited me. I was used to being in the U.S. where people routinely asked, “How’re you doin’?”—a greeting that always put me on the defensive. I’d always try to justify my existence by magnifying whatever I was doing with my life at that moment and try to make it sound important. That day, just as I’d grown accustomed to doing in the U.S., I rattled off the things I was doing to my aunt, which, at the time, weren’t a whole lot. I was visiting my ailing mother in the hospital, reorganizing things in the house, and getting in touch with friends. There was a great deal of leisure at that time, I must admit. (I can feel my stomach muscles contract as I write this—I feel guilty confessing to indulging in leisure. I feel I must legitimize my leisure time, make it sound somehow “earned.” See how conditioned I am?)

My aunt furrowed her eyebrows, confusion washing over her face as she said, “Priya, I didn’t ask you what you were doing. I wanted to know how you are.” And then I spilled out all my feelings about my mother’s illness, my move to India, and my various conundrums. At that time, I also began thinking about how much language reveals about a culture, and how everyday expressions in American English signify America’s devout veneration of action, motion, and productivity.

Besides “how’re you doing?,” there are numerous expressions in American English that reflect this obsession with action and ceaseless motion, this deeply ingrained notion that the value of doing vastly supersedes the value of being. “What’s happening?” “What are you doing this weekend?” “What are your plans for the summer?” The underlying implication is always the same—are you active enough to matter? Are you doing enough to validate your existence? (When I lived in the U.S., the pressure to do sometimes became so overwhelming for me that I started conjuring up grand plans for the weekend. Instead of admitting that I intended simply to veg out in bed and watch some Netflix, I’d say things like I was planning to see an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday, listen to a fabulous new jazz sensation in the West Village on Saturday, followed by dinner at a cozy Peruvian restaurant.)

Now back to language. What’s one of the first questions people ask each other when they first meet in America? Read more »