Midway through Plato’s Symposium the comic poet Aristophanes takes the floor. He tells us that, in the beginning, we were whole, shaped like the heavenly bodies. But we became too powerful and made wa...

A country’s capacity to provide for minority protections, and more broadly its cultivating the kind of tolerance that makes such protections unnecessary, is simply a mark of liberal civilization.

Trump's trade war didn't just hurt the economy—it exposed how quickly everyone, from politicians to the public, abandons good sense under pressure.

On not talking to people who are not worth talking to

YouTube video by Flippy92

Far from thinking that ‘might makes right’, the great historian’s analysis of war identifies a vice common to all states

On our curious Hungarian fixation

The perpetrators of these crimes are not only threatening Jews, but the rule of law and the government's ability to protect civil society

In the internet age, in the absence of direct social interaction, we have been compelled to invent people to get mad at.

Perhaps the closest thing President Donald Trump has to a bedrock principle is his instinctive opposition to any arrangement that favors — or seems to favor — the other guy. The notion that someone…

Its modern meaning is less suggestive of obligations than of a desired status that confers benefits.

I felt I needed a bit of a break from heavier themes, and this post was inspired by my friend Ryan Floyd of Detached Notes. He has belatedly made the excellent decision to get into vinyl and has been ...

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hegemon

The 2020s are entering the era of the 'woke right', where permissible language is dictated by right-wing governments.

YouTube video by A Mandolin Player on Carnegie Hill

Looking back and forward on the second anniversary of the 10/7 attacks

Looking back and forward on the second anniversary of the 10/7 attacks

On Ta-Nehisi Coates' sojourn to the Holy Land

On the mental resistance of despair as political practice

Considerations on Dante, Caetano Veloso, Jason Stanley, and me

An increasingly multicultural Canada is increasingly hostile towards Canada’s Jews

Over three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama published his famous End of History and the Last Man, in which he declared that history (or rather, “History”), meaning an unfolding process of clashing ideas,...