In the Winter 2026 issue: William Baude on who is the greatest constitutional authority in the land?; Abbas Milani, Ali Khamenei: a profile in dogma; Susie Linfield on the politics of the hardened heart: the Left since October 7; James Wolcott on the very golden age of Donald Trump; Hamze Awawde, a Palestinian’s plea for Zionism; Sheila O’Malley on an argument for tactility; Julia Kieserman, what on earth really happens in the cloud?; Agnes Callard on the moral dimension of leisure; Melanie W. Sisson on the new grounds for nuclear fear; Evan Parks on poems, protests, and the crisis in higher education; Andrew Butterfield on good governance in Renaissance art; Mark Edmundson, Robert Frost may have the cure for what ails us; Steve Wasserman on the rise and fall and rise of American publishing; Yahia Lababidi, the poet as seer: Miłosz and Merton; Constantin Waldschmidt, when Freud and Rilke went for a walk; Morten Høi Jensen on a Mann of the middle class; Celeste Marcus, “I Am Trying To Live A Life I Do Not Understand”; and Leon Wieseltier on the big beautiful mess of the past, the present, and the future. Also including poems by Rosanna Warren, Haris Vlavianos, and Amir Gilboa.
Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Does Success Help?
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is Curiosity Dangerous?
On this episode of Required Reading, Morten Høi Jensen and Lance Richardson discuss Richardson’s new biography Peter Matthiessen, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, exploring the author’s environmentalism, his time working for the CIA, and his fascination with the Bigfoot Legend."
On November 7th, 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer's Indian citizenship. Return to Self: Excursions in Exile is a memoir about processing that violent ejection; the meaning of self after statehood; and the gross brutality, so recognizable to Americans todaym, which forced that rupture.
January 6, 2026
In November 1952, C. Vann Woodward gave the presidential address at the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association, titled “The Irony of Southern History.” He was paying tribute to, and was deeply influenced by, the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s just published, now classic essay, “The Irony of American History.” And I’m paying tribute to...
Read More Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Her dresses rebel in the dark lagoon. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. Anguish in silks, sequined by the moon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. The waves a dirge: too soon, too soon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Henry jabbing, stabbing each black balloon. The waves...
Read More Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Most of his body is lost except for parts of a leg, a foot, some toes. Her head’s turned slightly left, still centered on the place where he climbed up on her knee to bless the animals. Empty now as her womb, the small hole drilled in her chest for...
Read More Read MoreDecember 22, 2025
Dr. Franz Kafka, as he is officially listed, is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery, about a mile down the road from where I live in the neighbourhood of Žižkov. The greater Olšany Cemetery, which it adjoins, is across the street from my apartment. I often go there for walks in the evening, meandering along...
Read More Read MoreDecember 15, 2025
In the heart of Tehran, beneath the surface of ordinary weekday routines, a quiet rebellion pulses through the city’s cultural veins. On a midweek evening in a subterranean bookstore everything seems perfectly ordinary, everything in its place. The clock ticks steadily towards half past ten and only a handful of customers begin to leave. The...
Read More Read MoreDecember 8, 2025
The world has one remaining newspaper that prints its pages in both Turkish and Armenian. Its name, Agos, is a word used in Armenian and Turkish that means furrow, the groove in which one plants a seed. Like nearly everything else Armenian in Turkey, Agos makes itself inconspicuous — I couldn’t even find the paper’s...
Read More Read MoreDecember 1, 2025
On September 9, the Munich Philharmonic inaugurated its 2025/26 season with the sort of solid, crowd-pleasing program that a major orchestra uses to set its tone for the year. From the elegant stage of the Isar philharmonic, the city’s new concert hall, the orchestra performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring the radiant Sol Gabetta, Schubert’s “Unfinished,”...
Read More Read MoreNovember 24, 2025
Reviews of Love Me Tender (which premiered at the Cannes film festival last summer) describe it as a film about motherhood. This description is not inaccurate, but it is importantly limited. Love Me Tender is in part a story of two parents fighting over custody. Vicky Krieps plays Clemence, a mother struggling with a manipulative...
Read More Read MoreNovember 19, 2025
A decade ago, on the first occasion that I ever heard Leon Wieseltier speak, he uttered a phrase that I have been thinking about ever since. Leon confessed he suffered from what he called “historical envy” because his mentors — giants like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Gershom Scholem — had fought epoch-altering battles for...
Read More Read MoreListen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Does Success Help?
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is Curiosity Dangerous?
On this episode of Required Reading, Morten Høi Jensen and Lance Richardson discuss Richardson’s new biography Peter Matthiessen, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, exploring the author’s environmentalism, his time working for the CIA, and his fascination with the Bigfoot Legend."
On November 7th, 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer's Indian citizenship. Return to Self: Excursions in Exile is a memoir about processing that violent ejection; the meaning of self after statehood; and the gross brutality, so recognizable to Americans todaym, which forced that rupture.
