Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

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Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

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Europe’s New Court Intellectual The name Giuliano Da Empoli might not mean much to American readers, but in Europe the Swiss-Italian writer has established himself as one of the continent’s most fêted political and intellectual comm...

For @readliberties.bsky.social I wrote about the favorite writer of Europe's political elites:

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Monster of the Enlightenment Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

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Gloire Days - Liberties Though democracy is ostensibly the opposite of monarchy, the mass culture that is American democracy has betrayed in every age a deep atavistic yearning for royalty. From the days of “King” Andrew Jac...

James Wolcott, superstar. Read these two recent pieces (if you can get past the paywall) to see what I mean. Where is this guy's Pulitzer for Criticism anyway?

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

libertiesjournal.com/articles/glo...

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

Tell the truth Putin won't.
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Aliens Among Us “Our most sincere film can seem phony.” When François Truffaut wrote that in 1975 he could have been describing Hollywood’s long and largely sorry history of prestige pictures that, at least in the mi...

I was hooked by the phrase, "wild overpraise given to One Battle After Another, a puffed-up Spy vs. Spy strip," but I'm glad I stuck around for the rest.
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Monster Of The Enlightenment Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

A bracing reading of #Frankenstein that asks whether human beings can be trusted with what they create 🤖

— Elena Kagan, Liberties @readliberties.bsky.social

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#booksky #movies #AI

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

This is a phenomenal read.

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

“Hundreds of us had gathered there to share in her distress, and so none of us was alone...

'When the black cloud comes, if one flame flickers / We will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers'...

I am still screaming with them. So are you."

❤️‍🔥 #Grateful

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Secretaries of the Invisible  - Liberties “I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pret...

Who serves best doesn't always understand.

— Czesław Milosz

libertiesjournal.com/articles/sec... #booksky #writingcommunity

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

Last year I set out to review Joseph Leo Koerner's Art in a State of Siege for @readliberties.bsky.social. That morphed into a study of how the First World War changed artistic expression, fascist art anxiety, and one year of bootlicking backlash in the USA: libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic... Good to keep in mind when observing our own leaders too.

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

Consider how these fourteen characteristics align with Donny and his party—and that since the 1960s at least, the GOP have pushing same.
The GOP is a fascist party has been for a long time.
That the national Democrats are don’t fight this…
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Hidden in the Bourgeois - Liberties The hero of The Magic Mountain — the perfectly ordinary, blond, blue-eyed Hans Castorp —  is the typological bourgeois male. I spent seven years writing a book about the novel of which he serves as pr...

At Liberties, the wonderfully eloquent Morten Høi Jensen wrestles again with the enigma of Thomas Mann, whose outward ordinariness allowed him to, as Mann perhaps flatteringly put it, "hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” libertiesjournal.com/articles/hid...

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

"... the ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is now estimated to be about 1:10,000,000. A symbolic punishment for a man who himself claimed to be “made of literature.” 🪳Kafka Inc., Jared Marcel Pollen. libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

In the mail, mentally-enriching new issue of @readliberties.bsky.social , featuring my meditation on The Poet as Seer: Miłosz and Merton 👁️

libertiesjournal.com

#LibertiesJournal #Miłosz #Merton #PoetryAsWitness #LiteraryCulture #SpiritualWriting

Kafka Inc. 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 ...

Kafkology, Kundera contends, “produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.”

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Kafka Inc. 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 ...

Loved this essay by Jared Marcel Pollen on Kafka.

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

The Rise and Fall and Rise of American Publishing - Liberties I knew the jig was up when one day, in the fall of 1995, my boss and publisher Peter Osnos asked me to lunch. I was then editorial director of Times Books, an imprint of Random House. Previously, I ha...

On publication and its discontents

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“I Am Trying To Live A Life I Do Not Understand” - Liberties Frequently, in conversation with others or in an incessant inner monologue, I try to imagine what a world after this, after this political crisis, after this historical paroxysm, will look like. I lov...

libertiesjournal.com/articles/iam...

I wrote about losing my countries for @readliberties.bsky.social

The High Art of Distance - Liberties “Art, of course, lives in history,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. By which she meant that a novel emerges in its own time, and changes in its passage to our own. This — the likeness which is also an unlike...

I wrote a big essay about Kawabata last year, if you're interested. It doesn't touch much on Gang, though maybe it should have: libertiesjournal.com/articles/the...

Kafka Inc. 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 ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

My latest, “Marbury Now,” is published in the latest issue of Liberties! libertiesjournal.com/articles/mar...