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2 weeks ago | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus |Jake Harrison
The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old as the Bible, it was not set down in a political philosophy until millennia later.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Len Gutkin |Jake Harrison
I take my title from the critic and literary scholar Simon During, who coined the phrase “cultural secularization” as a way of understanding the sharp decline in prestige — since the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the last decade — of the “high humanities.” The concept will strike many as evasively abstract, and certainly it is as open to skepticism and revision as its predecessor and model, the social-scientific and philosophical account of religious secularization...
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Elena Kagan |Jake Harrison
It would be silly to call William Wyler underrated — he was one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful movie directors in American history. A staple in every American film canon, he was my favorite director long before I knew his name. Growing up I watched Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, and Jezebel dozens of times without noticing that four of my favorite movies were directed by the same person.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus |Jake Harrison
Horror — like beauty, passion, and all states in extremis — confounds the habits which regulate the human mind. Before articulation — which is to say, before the experience or the witness of horror is transformed from something beyond our ken into a verbal artifact manufactured by reason or insight or prejudice or all of these things — we are alone with something unlike the materials we are able to know.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Robert J. Alter |Jake Harrison
The writer responsible for Job is the greatest of all biblical poets and one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Michael Ignatieff |Jake Harrison
I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of life. We liberals commonly tell ourselves that, unlike the far right and the far left, we reach our beliefs through a rational inspection of the world as it is, but I didn’t get my ideas that way.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Maurice Isserman |Jake Harrison
In 1952, a year after I was born and a decade and a half before I became an active participant on the American left, Daniel Bell published a book called Marxian Socialism in America, the first serious scholarly examination of the subject. He considered, among other questions, why the traditional Marxist parties in the United States had by then descended into abject political isolation.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison
Sunrise lines a cloud: flamingo silk in an old fur coat. Seagulls catch the wind like scraps of paper. She’s been up for hours, wrapped in her old plaid bathrobe. Migraine. Lightning flashes behind her eyelids. She drinks her coffee and writes: the tattered world. Later there will be champagne and candlelight Phone calls from overseas. She’ll watch the full moon rise over the blue deeps and write a dreaming Fury. Who said to kill yourself for a man Is a waste of a good suicide?
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison
Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the oven — why do we love it? — and urges himself to embrace his fate, like a rock in the ocean, waves boiling.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison
My witchy hair so furious and alive stands up and crackles like a scratched 78 Galli-Curci singing from the moon Sempre libera! It’s an owl’s nest twigs and feathers and bones and rain a straw broom forgotten in a corner but still capable of spontaneous combustion so watch out. There’s joy in taking your final shape if it’s what you’re meant to be. Who needs color anyway when the ocean in winter is so voracious and so beautiful?
