Alexandre Lefebvre at Noema:
In Jean Bodin’s “Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime,” a fabulously wealthy Venetian nobleman named Coronaeus invites six guests to his home for a week of amusement and conversation.
By day, the guests stroll the gardens, enjoy lavish meals, play with optical illusions, take naps and read. But by night, when wine begins flowing, things get feisty. Coronaeus, a devout Catholic, planned the week to learn how the rest of the world lives and thinks. This is why his guests are a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a skeptic and a philosophical naturalist. Together, they debate everything under the sun — including the nature of the sun itself. Their sharpest clashes concern what it means to live well and the ultimate purpose of human life, as they alternate between attempts at persuasion and the realization of its futility.
Suppose we wanted to repeat the experiment in 2025. More pointedly, let’s put ourselves in Coronaeus’s shoes: a wealthy and comfortable hegemon at a time when his hegemony was challenged. In the 16th century, that meant being Catholic. In the 21st century, it means being liberal while the liberal-democratic order begins to crack. So, if we, like Coronaeus, want to understand how our rivals live and think, who should we invite?
It’s obvious: Liberals should seek out the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural pre-eminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years.
More here.
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My childhood home 
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How many ways can you say the word ‘love’? In Arabic, Abbas El-Zein tells us in his memoir Bullet Paper Rock (2024), there are at least twenty-five, perhaps up to one hundred, words that express love in all its shades. The word jawa, for instance, refers to ‘alternating states of hope and despondency that a lover endures’. More than a word with a double meaning, it points to another kind of dynamic: the emotional tides typical of a lover’s conundrums about their beloved. Hope and despondency may initially strike us as incompatible, even oppositional, in meaning, yet they are less so than they appear. For El-Zein, expressions of love also contain ‘the possibility of [love’s] deficit, of a certain fragility inherent to the utterance’. In jawa, this four-letter container, we see mirrored back the tenuous fulfilment of love El-Zein describes. Just as love can be reciprocated and fulfilled, it can also be undercut and anguished by the prospect of its own defeat.
Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he wrote at night. He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read. When he is included in a university poetry course, it is often as an example of the conservative poetics from which his more provocative, difficult modernist contemporaries (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) sought to depart. A few years ago, I set out to write a dissertation on Frost, hoping that sustained focus on his work might allow me to discover a critical language for talking about accessible poems, the kind anybody could read. My research kept turning up interpretations of Frost’s poems that were smart, even beautiful, but were missing something. It was not until I found the journalist Adam Plunkett’s work that I was able to see what that was. “We misunderstand him,” Plunkett wrote of Frost in a 2014 
The Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov once said of writers, “And to write and write, like a wheel or a machine, tomorrow, the day after, on holidays; summer will come—and he must still be writing. When is he to stop and rest? Unfortunate man?” Goncharov was born in 1812 and died in 1891, so I am clearly not the model for the writer he was talking about—even though, my prolificacy having often been commented upon, I could otherwise well be. The eponymous hero of his novel Oblomov feels the same way about another character in the book who loves travel, and a second one who enjoys a lively social life, and a third who works hard in the hope of promotion. All of them are viewed by Oblomov as absurdly out of synch with life’s real purpose. This purpose, as Oblomov sees it, is to lie abed doing nothing all the days of one’s life. If rest may be said to have a champion, it is Oblomov, a gentleman by birth for whom “life was divided, in his opinion, into two halves: one consisted of work and boredom—these words were for him synonymous—the other of rest and peaceful good-humor.” Rest, unrelenting rest, is the name of Oblomov’s game.
On February 18, in his inaugural 
Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the pencil about its middle, tracing out a circle. But if you slide it in clever ways, you can do much better.
Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds “so undone.”
This is a highly readable biography of the Berlin architect who founded the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s, by a British design historian. The Bauhaus was arguably the most significant innovation in design education since the Renaissance, as it replaced the then-standard imitation of classical and other historical forms in architecture with the now universal idea that design should be based on function and the economical provision of everyday needs. Although often considered dangerously radical in Germany in the 1920s, after World War II, Bauhaus design approaches spread widely, until they again began to be questioned by postmodernists in the 1970s. By the 1980s, architectural tastes had begun to shift toward an expensive neo-traditionalism. This biography does not address the low opinion many had of Gropius in that era, and it probably will not change some widespread perceptions of Gropius and modern architecture that have taken hold since his death in 1969. It does offer a readable and largely sympathetic account of the complicated personal history of this centrally important modern design educator and mentor.