Democracy and Dr. Kissinger

Posted on December 4, 2023
Image: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on Air Force One in 1974; Everett Collection HIstorical/Alamy.

Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.

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Dostoevsky’s Dangerous Gambit

Posted on December 8, 2023
Image: “Alyosha and Vanya,” 1971, by Mikhail Rojter (1916–1993); The Gamborg Collection/Bridgeman Images; background: manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky is too Christian for a secular age and too secular for Christendom.

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Autocracy Rising

Posted on December 12, 2023
Image: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a rally in Izmir in May 2023; Shutterstock..

Turkey presents an inversion of the usual presumptions about the current global struggle between liberalism and conservatism.

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Self-Censorship and Don Quixote

Posted on December 14, 2023
Image: The Lion, illustration for Don Quixote, 1902, by William Strang, National Galleries of Scotland.

The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.

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Presentation and Power

Posted on December 20, 2023
Image: Signs at the site of an Occupy DC protest, 2011, Shutterstock.

The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.

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Taking the Long View

Posted on December 29, 2023
Image: THR illustration (Bonki Studio/Shutterstock).

The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.

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