Jonathan Haidt is working the room. The slim, silver-haired professor is standing on top of a chair in a hotel suite packed with professors, students, reporters, donors, and assorted kibitzers, giving a rapid-fire litany of what’s wrong with our young people and what we should do … | Continue reading
Ethnomusicology was initially the creation of a small number of men and women, mostly European and North American, who were trying to make sense of the growing number of recordings of music from non-Western cultures that were being made in the field, first on wax cylinders and th … | Continue reading
1. Spring: The Agent The room in which I have taught for the last four decades is a haphazard polygon, none of whose seven walls is anything like the others. To the northwest, three unwashed bay windows: stretch your neck for a glimpse of the Charles, ice-encrusted in the coldest … | Continue reading
What sort of typing instruction manual includes a practice sentence like, “Better a terrible end than terror without end?” Better yet, what kind of typing manual offers, also as practice texts, excerpts from Pirke Avot, stories from the Talmud, quotes by Goethe, and the writings … | Continue reading
In 2013 my friend Eduardo Medina-Mora became Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. We had known each other since 1988, when I was preparing a study of Mexico’s tax and regulatory system for a U.S. consulting firm, and Eduardo was running a small Mexico City law firm after a s … | Continue reading
The Bible is a refractory book, never behaving quite as we expect it to. Indeed, much of the creativity of Jewish tradition has been devoted to harmonizing the actual Bible with Judaism’s changing expectations of what it should be. The rabbinic genre of midrash tries to make sens … | Continue reading
Months away from publishing her debut novel, Amélie Wen Zhao, a young Asian author and rising star of YA fiction, just killed her own book to appease a mob who condemned her work as racist despite the fact that they most likely hadn’t read it | Continue reading
As Congress investigates the Twitter account behind the viral Covington video, the media’s role in weaponizing tweets is being overlooked | Continue reading
A few years ago, I brought a group of poetry students to Stanford University’s library to see the archive of Allen Ginsberg’s work. The iconic Beat poet had left a large collection of papers, photographs, and artifacts, and the curator had selected a dozen gems for us. There was … | Continue reading
The first literary anniversary of 2019 will be one of the biggest: Jan. 1 marks the centenary of J.D. Salinger. (To mark the occasion, his four books are being reissued in a boxed set by Little Brown.) A hundred years seems like it ought to be a long time in literary history—Sali … | Continue reading
I. The American left, which has sometimes been poor in institutions, has always been wealthy in political philosophy—and you can see the wealth and its significance in two books of our own moment, one by the late Richard Rorty and the other by Michael Walzer. Perhaps Rorty’s book … | Continue reading
The mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27 was the deadliest attack on Jewish Americans in history. We must be clearheaded about the nature of this attack. This was not only a shooting. This was not only an act of hate. This was not only an act of violence. This w … | Continue reading
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose political correctness. A recent survey of 8,000 Americans reveals that people of all ages, races, and educational levels oppose it by lopsided margins. None of the demographic categories presumed to be aligned with it, or to fall with … | Continue reading
Historians sometimes speak of “the long 19th century”—a continuation of the superficial stability seen in the late 1800s, which in 1914 was finally shattered by World War I. Almost two decades into the 21st century, we are now experiencing a comparable breakdown of the apparent v … | Continue reading
There are but a handful of Russian musical exports familiar to the average American. Among them are the classics: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev. Next are the chestnuts: world-renowned tunes like “Ochi Chernye” (Dark Eyes) and “Korobeiniki,” more commonly know … | Continue reading
The Village Voice officially expired a few weeks ago, and some part of me has been feeling a little homeless ever since in the Robert Frost sense, with home defined as the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I did use to think that someday, because t … | Continue reading
Among the spy and detective fiction writers of today there is no distinction more dubious than “transcending the genre.” What does it mean for a work to transcend the genre? To have outgrown its form? To be better than it should be? It is with this backhanded honorific that the s … | Continue reading
Historical narratives are built around artifacts—preserved and frail relics from past epochs. Mythology erupts in the absence of such relics, and it is the sort of absence that doesn’t let one alone. Celebrating its first centennial this year, the Jewish Archive at the Vernadsky … | Continue reading
At 92 years old, Virginia “Jean” Wahab hadn’t lost any of the vitality and health she maintained throughout her life. She raised two daughters as a single mom and made a home for them in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Michigan. Wahab worked on her feet and didn’t retire from her … | Continue reading
Today marks the 109th birthday of Isaiah Berlin, the great Riga-born Russian-British political philosopher and historian of ideas. It is difficult to overstate the influence that Berlin held over British cultural institutions and the effect that his work continues to have on poli … | Continue reading
In many parts of the world, Jews are increasingly unwelcome in the 21st century. The number of countries in which wearing visibly Jewish clothing such as a kippa means risking physical violence has hit an all-time high. On both the individual and the national level, Jews are targ … | Continue reading