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 »

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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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by Malcolm Murray

Javier Milei’s libertarian government in Argentina recently laid out a new framework for corporations in the country. Among the various simplifications to attract more investment, was a highly interesting one – the creation of Sociedad Automatizada – automated corporations run by AI agents without the need for any human involvement. This could just be a PR move (it is unclear if it’ll pass parliament). Milei is in need of some good PR, struggling as he is with an economy with persistent high inflation despite his chainsaw economic management. Others speculate that this is related to Peter Thiel’s recent move to Argentina. But if this becomes law, it could make Argentina the first jurisdiction to allow for fully autonomous AI corporations.

This could obviously bring all kinds of risks. Yuval Noah Harari laid these out well in a letter to the FT. However, it is likely the kind of experimentation we need and should be applauded.

What are AI corporations? A recent paper by Arbel, Salib and Goldstein offers some definitions. Basically, like other corporations, it is an entity with legal personhood. This means it can take actions and it can receive counter-actions, such as being sued. The difference with regular corporations is that no human needs to be involved, it can be fully run by autonomous AI agents. Note that this does not provide any claims of personhood to the individual AI agents, only to the corporation. Neither does it of course make any moral claims as to AI welfare or consciousness or the like.

The risks are obvious. An AI corporation can operate at machine speed beyond human recognition and could cause “flash crashes” before any human would have time to react. As mentioned by Harari, the standard deterrent of the CEO being put in jail would not deter AIs, so it is unclear what deterrents there are to prevent the AI corporation from conducting illegal actions. If AI money is also speech and AI corporations are allowed to make political donations, they could quickly gain significant political influence and gain economic advantages. Quantity has a quality all its own, as Stalin said.

However, these might be necessary risks to take in order to experiment with AI liability. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

The Wild Duck is an old poker story. It has other names. Lollapalooza is one. But the way I heard it was Wild Duck.

It seems a stranger came to town and got in a back-room poker game with some of the local boys. After an hour or two he drew a full house and bet it hard. A guy on the other side of the table raised. The stranger raised him back. Finally, he called, lay down his full house, and reached for the pot. The other guy said, “Not so fast, stranger, I’ve got a Wild Duck” and he turned over a pair of fours and a three, six, nine of different suits.

The rest of the boys at the table cheered “Wild Duck! Wild Duck!” and raised their glasses. “What the hell is a Wild Duck?” the stranger cried. The bartender came over, put a large hand on the stranger’s shoulder and said, “A Wild Duck beats anything. House rules.”

The stranger considered his options and sat back down. After another hour or two he looked at his hand and saw a pair of fours and a three, six, nine of different suits. He bet it hard. Another guy raised. The stranger raised him back and the other guy raised again. The stranger went all in. He lay down his Wild Duck with a flourish and reached for the pot. The room was silent.

The bartender came over again and pointed to a small sign on the wall behind the bar. It said: A Wild Duck is only good once a night.

The Purcell Principle comes from a 2006 Supreme Court case called Purcell v. Gonzalez.  In Purcell the State of Arizona had enacted a law intended to “combat voter fraud by requiring voters to present proof of citizenship when they register to vote and to present identification when they vote on election day.” Plaintiffs sued on the grounds that the new requirements violated the Constitution. The Court of Appeals found for the plaintiffs and prevented the new law from going into effect. The Supreme Court stayed the Court of Appeals decision on the grounds that it was too close to the election to change the rules and voters might be confused.

This was odd. As Edwin Chemerinsky pointed out, “Why should unconstitutional or illegal restrictions on voting be allowed just because the challenge is being heard soon before the election?”  But there it is. Purcell stands for the proposition that “lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

The Supreme Court has invoked the principle several times in subsequent cases. Read more »