by Michael Liss

… I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism (Je m’en foutisme) in its people. —William L. Shirer, The Collapse Of The Third Republic

“Do you think America’s political system can still address the nation’s problems or is it too politically divided to solve its problems?” 33% said “can still address”; 64% “too politically divided.” —Results of a nationwide New York Times/Siena poll of 1,313 registered voters conducted from Sept. 22 to 27, 2025.

Let me take you back 10 years, to the fall of 2015. An email from a good friend, the type of person America doesn’t manufacture anymore—both a scholar and an international businessman, multilingual, connected to an array of influential institutions and people, and a moderate Republican.

He was writing just after the November 2015 Islamic State-sponsored Paris and Saint-Denis terror attacks, which left over 100 dead and 400 injured. The breakdown in civic culture was part of his concern, but it wasn’t the only one. He was profoundly worried about the startling rise of Donald Trump. He wondered if we in the United States weren’t also turning toward the anger, the xenophobia, and the dysfunction that characterized the discourse in 1920s and 1930s Europe. That was the atmosphere that brought then to a Hitler and a Mussolini, the “confusion, hopelessness and cynicism” in France that Shirer wrote of. Could it happen here?

For context, Trump had entered the contest for the GOP Presidential nomination on June 16, 2015. In his announcement speech, he mentioned economic themes like deficits and offshoring of jobs, but also pounded (with explicit, highly charged language) on illegal immigration and the threat of Islamic terrorism. Deficits and immigration were standard topics for any Republican, but Trump wasn’t “any Republican”—he was on his own island, launching what seemed a vanity candidacy by a man with a potty-mouth who sprayed people and entire ethnic groups with insults. His opponents scorned him, advertisers distanced themselves from him, and odds-makers were positive he had almost a negative chance of winning. Public polling seemed to bear them out. A June 2015 NBC/WSJ Poll had Jeb Bush in the lead at 22%, Scott Walker at 16%, Marco Rubio 14%, Ben Carson 11%, then six others (Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie) …. and, in 10th, the last position to qualify for the first GOP debate, Carly Fiorina. Not a Trump amongst them. There was something Trump did excel at—he was soundly rejected by the Republican public—16th out of 16 to the question of “Could you see yourselves supporting this candidate or not?” at a formidable minus 34%. It wasn’t that the Republican voter didn’t know Trump. They did know, and what they knew they didn’t like.

But Trump had found something most of the major Republican candidates, conservative commentariat, and the media, had missed. His inflammatory language, which they saw as crude, un-Presidential (and they hoped) disqualifying was heard as a beat to quarters by others. Trump might be a blowhard, but at least he didn’t sound like a lawyer or a professional politician. All those guys did was talk, and for all the rounded, consultant-tested phrases they laid out like tapas on a tasting menu, it was Trump, with his ill-mannered vitality, that got through. Read more »

by David Winner

In an interview with Ezra Klein about LGBTQ rights, Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of congress, talks about a “sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.”

I don’t know about that, but before the 2024 election and its tremendous blowback against rights of all but the narrowest sector of humans, tolerance for the LGBTQ community did seem to be at an all-time high.

A cultural time capsule, this writing relays some bizarre conversations about queer issues from long before, the 1990s.

Though I’m a straight cis man, I’ve been fortunate enough to land in queer-friendly worlds, and queerphobia has not been among my pantheon of character flaws. When I encountered milder forms of sexual harassment – persistently tongued in the ear by my friend’s drunken boyfriend on the J train platform just after college, fending off an aggressive Puerto Rican doctor at the gay male end of Jacob Riis beach a few years later – I was neither aroused nor disturbed nor disgusted. Just mildly annoyed.

My odd sartorial choices, my quirky mannerisms of speech often registered as gay when I was younger.

That misidentification started happening all the time after I began teaching at a community college in Journal Square in the 90s, a rough and seedy part of Jersey City. Female students tended to leave me alone, but some of the boys were out for blood, the gay blood that they assumed was mine. A dumb essay that I assigned, simply urging men to be more sensitive with no queer implications, was riotously mocked. Read more »

Hayv Kahraman. Rain Birds Ritual, 2025.

Oil, acrylic and flax on acrylic.

More here, here, and here.

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by J. M. Tyree

Morgan Meis and I have been talking about art for years. We’re friends and interlocutors, so I’ll refer to him by first name here for the sake of transparency. Morgan writes about painting; I write about movies. We spent the pandemic exchanging letters with each other about films by Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. These letters were later collected in a mad book called Wonder, Horror, Mystery, in which we spent 366 pages arguing like two flannel-wearing Gen X oldsters sipping lemonade on a porch.

I like reading arts criticism that is personal, not too heavy, and accessible to non-specialists, written in a style that is a little bit more intellectual than most American journalism and magazine writing, but a little less jargony and a little more fun to read than academic monographs. Maybe it is possible to dream of creating a form of arts criticism that is itself art. Hardly novel in itself – on the contrary, this idea returns criticism to certain old ways of writing about the arts, and makes a mess of the contemporary academic divisions between criticism, scholarship, and belletristic writing. This book does all of these things.

What Morgan has to say about art makes the world a more interesting place when one reads books like The Grand Valley, the last volume in his trilogy about paintings. The trilogy started with Rubens (The Drunken Silenus), continued with Franz Marc (The Fate of the Animals), and has now culminated with this new book about Joan Mitchell. Apart from Mitchell I strongly dislike the painters Morgan has selected for his triptych. Actually, Rubens is much more interesting than I previously thought, I realized, after reading Morgan’s book, and going to look at Rubens’s terrifying paintings in Munich (which are truly creepy and hellish). I still hate Rubens. Marc does nothing for me, to be honest. Among Mitchell’s paintings Morgan has selected the series of canvases entitled La Grande Vallée. Finally, things were looking up for me as a reader!

Joking aside, the preceding volumes in the trilogy are very compelling reads worth exploring and mulling over, but the trilogy is designed so that each book can be read separately and the reader won’t lose the thread. More generally, I love the idea of a trilogy of arts criticism books – in this economy? – for its simultaneously high-minded and intentionally ridiculous impression of self-mocking and self-serious moves. Refreshing. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sixty-five years ago this month, the John Coltrane Quartet entered Atlantic Studios in Manhattan for three days of recording sessions, over the course of a week. It was the first time the band recorded together. The four musicians  — Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones, McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums —   remarkably produced enough material for three albums, and then some, in those three sessions. Some of the recordings are jazz classics —   “Equinox,” for example, a Coltrane blues composition. Others include beautiful renditions of standards like “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Summertime,” and “But Not for Me.”

These three sessions involved intense, concentrated work by musicians at the top of their game.  But in just the second song they recorded, on the first day, lightning struck in one take. On Friday afternoon, October 21, 1960 these four men recorded “My Favorite Things” — 13 minutes, 46 seconds of pure transcendence.  My Favorite Things (Stereo) (2022 Remaster)

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this recording, but it’s got to be hundreds. And after having listened to it so many times, I still can’t describe it in any way that really does it justice. It’s just ineffable.

Most people associate the song with Julie Andrews. She sang it in the movie version of “The Sound of Music.”  My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music (Official HD Video)   But that movie only came out in 1965.  “The Sound of Music” started out, of course, as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It was based on the story of the real-life von Trapp family, as described in the 1949 memoir of its matriarch, Maria Von Trapp. It was first performed on Broadway in November 1959, with Mary Martin as Maria.

In October 1960, then, and even in March of 1961 when the recording was released, “My Favorite Things” was not the chestnut it is today. But Coltrane decided to try it. The version the quartet recorded is entirely different from the original cast recording sung by Mary Martin, or the later movie version by Julie Andrews, both of which are prim and perky. Read more »

I am reaching for your hand once more
and realize it always . . .

………………. —could  be  now

by Jim Culleny, 10/3/25

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by Christopher Hall

What does it mean to turn somebody into an object, either literally, by killing them, or in a more conceptual sense, by robbing them of freedom of thought and action? This, according to Simone Weil in her celebrated essay on the Iliad, is the central topic of that poem:

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form – the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. (Mary McCarthy’s translation)

A thing that has a soul. Is this not a rather routine definition of what a human being already is? In one line of thinking, a human being is an object, and no amount of force is needed to make this so. We are the same kind of stuff as rocks, clouds and black holes, even if one feels Weil would very much balk at this description, and insist that the human being, properly understood, is no sort of object at all. Why insist that force makes us into this “extraordinary entity” otherwise? Force may exercise the majority of its workings on the human object, but its ultimate goal and function, in Weil’s view, is an attack on the subject. Unless we are of the opinion that such a subject doesn’t actually exist – and there are plenty around who are – then force does indeed enact something terrible on the human being, whether we subsist, at least in part, as objects or not.

But what does that entail, exactly – the transition from subject to object? Read more »

by Ken MacVey

In my last two columns, I raised issues about certain versions of right-wing libertarianism. In my column “How Yard Sales Could Explain the Rise of Billionaires and Challenge Libertarian Thinking” I argue that the “yard sale model” developed by mathematicians and physicists to explain wealth inequality presents a provocative challenge to philosopher Robert Nozick’s vision of libertarianism as “utopia.” In my column “Crony Capitalism, Milton Friedman’s Contradiction, and Trumpocracy,” I discussed how Milton Friedman’s libertarian program was self-defeating by encouraging business to seek and get government favors inconsistent with a libertarian agenda.

Here I will discuss one of the most touted foundations for libertarianism: self-ownership. The first articulation of the idea of self-ownership is attributed to John Locke in his classic 1690 Second Treatise of Government when he pronounced: “[E]very man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the works of his hands we may say are properly his.” Nozick himself traces his libertarianism to Locke. Based upon this mixture of labor with property, rights to other property are established. Ultimately all property rights are derived from self-ownership and property rights ultimately define our fundamental rights as individuals.  Accordingly, the nonconsensual taking of property by private force or government taxation is violative of self-ownership and therefore wrong.

What is the Foundation of Self-Ownership  and Property Rights?

It has been noted by critics, such as philosopher Thomas Nagel, that Nozick does not lay a foundation to justify the Lockean starting point. I personally have observed that many libertarian writers assert self-ownership as a given without further justification. Libertarian Karl Hess, for example, wrote in his pioneering manifesto “The Death of Politics” that “Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of his life, to use and dispose as he sees fit.” That’s the extent of his justification of the self-ownership premise. Locke’s justification likewise does not go much further than its pronouncement. Nevertheless, the notion of self-ownership does have an intuitive appeal as a slogan. Versions of the idea can resonate outside libertarian circles, such as when women assert their reproductive rights (“I have the right to control my own body”).

There are some important values of autonomy the idea of self-ownership tries to capture. But there are problems with the idea. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Reading into and about Wallace Stevens this morning I find this quotation, “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings…loving them and feeling them, makes us search for the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration….” I’m an endless rewriter and surely this is part of the reason for that, getting the sound exactly right even if it means a shift in meaning, but I thought as I read those words of my first pure experience of the delight in sound divorced from meaning. I should add as an adult because I loved word-sounds as a child “Hey diddle diddle,” “with a knick-knack paddy whack,” Rumplestiltskin.

At this time I was sitting at my desk working as Assistant Director of Admissions at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey [auto-correct wanted to make it Upscale College which it wasn’t though it was a good school] reading a lot of Faulkner in my spare time, thinking of myself essentially a fiction person though I had written some traditional poems and had bouts of strange love with one poem and another. A phrase out of nowhere flew in one ear and almost out the other before I managed to catch it, “crew went the curlew as it flew in a curlicue.” I can’t explain the delight it gave me. I loved the sound of it, the shape of it, the feel of it though clearly it was meaningless. But meaning was irrelevant. I don’t know if I wrote it down, but memory found some way of retaining it. I would take it out now and then and feel it, almost like pebble one finds at a beach and carries in a pocket for awhile for comfort.

Almost sixty years later, I found a place to put it. I was poet laureate of Santa Clara County in California. There were half a dozen other laureates around and we were going to do a reading together. I suggested that it would be fun to all write something of the same kind and suggested a piece of exactly 100 words. It could be prose or lined, whatever shape or form, but it had to be exactly 100 words including the title. The ocean of words and word combination possibilities is so large that some kind of shape-giving limitation is a gift not a handicap. By making things harder, it makes things easier. Read more »

by David Beer

The other day, in a cavernous sports superstore, I thought of J.G. Ballard. Echoey. Compartmentalised. Fluorescent. Stuffed with product. It was, probably quite obviously, the sort of place Ballard might have imagined the norms of society suddenly collapsing in on themselves, unable to carry their own contradictions. 

Banal yet shiny, ordered yet unstable, glowing yet unspectacular. It just seemed a ripe setting for a sequel to his 1975 novel High Rise, in which, famously, a luxury tower block became the scene of a destructive uprising against the hierarchical social stratification that its vertical floors represented. Or, maybe I could be trapped alone in the store, unable to escape its automatic doors, in a twist on Concrete Island, the 1974 tale of the motorist marooned in a dead-space between intersecting motorways.

I was welcomed by a basket of varied coloured footballs and a rack of monochrome mid-calf socks. To the side an array of baseball caps – each a slight variation on the last. 

The store swung around to the left in an L shaped-layout. A dog-leg left, perhaps leading to the golf section. There was a second floor too, with equal square footage. Desolate. In the distance, two racks of sporty house-slippers. 

Moving through what I imagined the store planners refer to as zones, everything arrived in glances. Fleeting eye movements, taking in the many minute differences. Rapid and brief views of garments momentarily visible, as lines of sight allowed. Flashes of light off mirrors. High wattage signs. The light was artificially bright. Yet there seemed to be no shadows. 

The folds of products are deep-lined. The rails packed tight. The display shelves carry the weight of consumables. Lots of things for sport, and many more besides. Some faux sheepskin boots. Decorative desert boots. A NASA emblazoned bomber jacket – for when you wish to look like an astronaut attending a post-flight press conference. My attention jumped between fuzzy fragments, bits and pieces.

All these things and no algorithm to tell me what I should purchase. That is what I was missing in the actual concrete shop. I had no automated prediction of my taste. I had to make my own decisions. Trying to navigate the mass of items the absence of automation became obvious. I was manual, analogue shopping.  Read more »

by Ed Simon

We read for many reasons – to be edified and educated, entertained and enlightened; but let’s be honest, sometimes we just want a nice, strong cup of tea. Whether there is some malignancy in my soul or not, the novels which I read over the past two months greatly indulged my not-so-secret inner energy vampire. Accounts of embarrassments, addictions, traumas, affairs and dramatic scenes. My currency through these books, all of them recently published, was that of cringe. And I loved them. Because the thing with tea is that it’s not just a little treat for the part of us that loves the spectacle of human debasement, but that there is some spiritual nourishment that comes along with it.

Nineteenth-century historian Henry Thomas Buckle said that “gossip is the lowest form of communication,” but that’s the sour grapes of a long-dead man that none of us know anything about other than that snobbish opinion. Because gossip can be fantastic. At its core, there can be a moral aspect to gossip. Yes, there is an element of judgement, as well as one of gratitude that the subject of discussion isn’t you. But there are lessons to be learned, ethical and human lessons, in stories where the individual train goes off the track. Besides, a central aspect of fiction is precisely this investigation of the contours of human behavior at its most embarrassing, it’s most desperate and ridiculous. An element of the memento mori in gossip and the literature of human interaction at its most shaky, vulnerable, and attenuated. Of human behavior at its most abjectly messy.

Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, released in September of this year, is a consummate cup of tea. Written as a visceral first-person monologue from an anonymous narrator, a New York arts writer who has only just returned from a London exile to attend a friend’s funeral and a dinner honoring a famous actress unknown to all of the literati whom she used to consider compatriots, the voice of Happiness and Love evokes stream-of-consciousness (but not entirely). The novel is written in long, rollicking, run-on sentences with no chapter breaks; in fact, with no paragraph breaks at all. The narrator has a tendency to repeat the same observations two or three or eight times, or to contradict herself, or to argue with various ever-shifting positions in her own mind. Far from being exhausting, which my description admittedly might make it sound, Dubno’s voice is exhilarating. Read more »

Just a jet over Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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by Lei Wang

If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’ve told my friends, please sacrifice me for your continued survival. Eat me early on, while I still have viable meat. Don’t be shy. I’m not offering out of selflessness; I’d just rather not suffer. I am afraid something might be wrong with the survival part of my brain. After all, just as there is attachment to existence, there is attachment too to non-existence. I am scared of many things, but death itself is not one of them. I fear living more.

I am afraid of injury, of poverty, of failure to meet my own potential—that yawning maw between who I am and who I imagine I could be—most of all of lovelessness, perhaps the root of all fears. Because I guess I still don’t get it. I don’t get how we’re supposed to only love certain people, the ones we know, and not others, though I am as guilty of this as anyone, if not more. How even then, unless you are given permission or related by blood or unless they really need your help in some unequivocal way, you are still supposed to hide your love for the ones you know, lest you overwhelm them. I don’t know why we can love someone and then stop. Or why I’m still trying to make noises of love to people who aren’t making noises of love back. I don’t understand hunger when there is such abundance, when love is free.

To love is to take someone else as part of you, the spiritual teacher Teal Swan says: a form of returning to the wholeness. When you love someone, you are no longer separately acting out of your own self-interests, or your self-interest naturally expands to include those you love. But where is the line between that and codependency, a lack of boundaries?

Mostly, I still don’t get why we can’t just hang out with the people we like, all the time, and preferably somewhere in Italy. Why do we live in different cities? Why is there such a thing as work? Why all these walls? Or space-time at all? These are rather childish questions, I know. Read more »

by Sherman J. Clark

Dante begins The Divine Comedy in a dark wood, lost. He cannot see the way forward. His journey out of confusion and despair depends on a guide—not just Virgil, who leads him through Hell and Purgatory, but ultimately Beatrice, whose beauty awakens in him a love that points beyond itself. Beatrice is not simply an object of desire. She is a source of orientation, a reminder that desire itself can be educated, elevated, and directed toward what is most real and most nourishing.

We too are often in a kind of dark wood—a thicket of distractions, manipulations, and half-truths. And we are surrounded by guides of a sort—marketers, algorithms, prosperity preachers, podcasters and influencers of every sort, all competing for our attention and trying to shape our desires. But unlike Beatrice, they do not aim to elevate or orient us toward what nourishes. Their purpose is to capture and monetize our attention, to keep us scrolling and buying and craving.

This is not just an annoyance. It is a crisis of desire. Our wants—so deeply bound up with our hopes, our fears, our sense of meaning—are increasingly manufactured to serve others’ ends. If desire is the engine of our striving, we are in danger of running on fuel that corrodes us. Read more »

Benny Andrews. Circle Study #2, 1972.

More here, and here.

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by Tim Sommers

The ends don’t justify the means. Right? But then what does?

Utilitarians say that, of course, the ends justify the means. If the ends can’t justify the means, then nothing can. Utilitarianism is built on the twin pillars of welfarism and consequentialism.

Consequentialism is the view that the morally right thing to do is whatever has the best consequences.

Welfarism is the view that the only thing intrinsically valuable is human happiness, welfare, well-being, having their desires fulfilled, flourishing, or the like.

Utilitarianism calls whatever it is exactly that matters in terms of human good (happiness, having your preferences fulfilled and flourishing are not exactly the same thing) utility. Utility is a technical term for whatever it is that is intrinsically valuable – which has something to do with human happiness

Powerful intuitions support this combination of consequentialism and welfarism. From a consequentialist perspective, to deny the truth of utilitarianism is to be forced to defend the claim that sometimes, given the choice, we should find the worse morally superior to the better. Specifically, that we should sometimes do the thing that has worse consequences – even when we could have done something with better consequences. From the welfarist perspective, to deny utilitarianism is to be forced to defend the claim that we must, at least sometimes, intentionally do things that make everyone overall less happy when we could have done something that would have made people overall more happy.

“During much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some form of utilitarianism,” John Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice. “One reason for this is that it has been espoused by a long line of brilliant writers who have built up a body of thought truly impressive in its scope and refinement…Hume and Adam Smith, Bentham and Mill, were social theorists and economists of the first rank; and the moral doctrine they worked out was framed to meet the needs of their wider interests.”

However, all the classical utilitarians had in common that they used two very different kinds of argumentative strategies to bolster the view: one we might call the negative or downward approach, the other, the positive or upwards argument. Read more »