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Jan 15, 2025 | 
quillette.com | Marilyn Simon |Sean Welsh |Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield
Back in 1979, historian Christopher Lasch warned that a crisis of narcissism was about to consume our culture because self-referential thinking and feeling were being championed as ethical, effective, and equitable. His book The Culture of Narcissism provides an archaeology of how we got to where we are now, 45 years later. Behind the narcissistic impulse, he wrote, lies a desire to soothe emotional frustration and erase cognitive tension.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
quillette.com | Sean Welsh |Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield
The fall of Syria’s Ba’athist regime has been a strategic setback for authoritarian Russia, theocratic Iran, and (most obviously) the Assad dictatorship itself. But the big winner in Syria was not liberal democracy, it was jihadism. Just twelve days after the attack on Aleppo on 27 November, Syria’s mujahideen were already in the capital. Before his triumphant arrival in Damascus, most of the world regarded Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) organisation as terrorists.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
quillette.com | Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield |Samuel Veissière
On 5 January 2025, at a business meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) held in New York City, the assembled members voted 428 to 88 in favour of a “resolution to oppose scholasticide in Gaza.” The resolution had been proposed by an organisation of left-wing historians calling themselves Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD).
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jonathan Kay |Jaspreet Singh Boparai |Holly Lawford-Smith |Jeffrey Herf
A review of The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, by David Alff, 280 pages, The University of Chicago Press (April 2024). One mark of a great writer is an ability to produce beautiful prose even when describing life’s passing banalities.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Greg Koabel |Matt Hanson |Fred Litwin |Jeffrey Herf
What follows is the twenty-first instalment of The Nations of Canada, a serialised Quillette project adapted from Greg Koabel’s ongoing podcast of the same name. While this series is called “Nations of Canada,” readers will have noticed that many of the events being described did not take place in what is now Canada. There are two reasons for these excursions.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Matt Hanson |Fred Litwin |Jeffrey Herf |Jason Andrew Garshfield
A review of Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack; 576 pages; John Murray Press (June 2024)I first heard Nick Drake’s music in a Volkswagen commercial, of all things, during the late 1990s. A couple gazed at each other in a moonlit car while an English voice crooned about a pink moon over a wistfully strummed guitar. The product didn’t interest me, but that commercial sparked my lifelong devotion to Drake’s music.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Pamela Paresky |Matt Hanson |Fred Litwin |Jeffrey Herf
In an interview by Pamela Paresky, Lahav Harkov, a journalist and political analyst, discusses the Israeli parliamentary system, highlighting the challenges of forming coalitions and the voter’s role in selecting parties over individual candidates. She examines the tension between ultra-Orthodox Jews, exempt from military service, and the secular community, emphasising the need for mutual recognition in achieving peace agreements.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Fred Litwin |Jeffrey Herf |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Brian Stewart
This just might be the hundredth article you’ve seen on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody thinks they have something of value to add to the conversation. Far too many people have awful opinions. For instance, have a look at this:Dr Karen Pinder teaches at the University of British Columbia Medical School. Her X account has since been deleted.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jeffrey Herf |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Brian Stewart |Ralph Leonard
From 8 October 2023 onwards, demonstrators and organisations at Harvard, Columbia, and many other elite American universities sought to obscure or deny the realities of Hamas’s interrupted genocide on 7 October. With Israel’s retaliation still in its early weeks, some historians—including historians of the Holocaust, no less—warned that Israel was itself in danger of committing genocide in Gaza.
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Jun 25, 2024 | 
fathomjournal.org | Izabella Tabarovsky |Jeffrey Herf |Alan Johnson
Izabella Tabarovsky is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute and a fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP. Follow her on X @IzaTabaro. Her Fathom essay ‘Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism’ is one of our most read. 7 October brought on an explosion of vicious, conspiratorial propaganda about Israel and Zionism.
