In 2012, I went to a rally for Senate hopeful Joe Donnelly, the Democratic candidate for the Indiana senate seat vacated by Dick Lugar, a Republican moderate that in the primary had been run out of office by the Tea Party candidate, Richard Mourdock. You might remember that name because he and . . .
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Christian Appy’s new book, American Reckoning, is a brilliant and readable synthesis of all previous thinking about the Vietnam War plus deep insights into the inner workings of the powers behind the war, especially what the American people were not privy to at the time. The war had gone sour for LBJ and key members . . .
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Editor’s note: On March 16, 2015, in Torino, Italy, the first witnesses will be heard in a trial brought by the Italian state against Erri De Luca, one of Europe’s best-known living writers. During an interview published on the Italian site of The Huffington Post, in response to a question put to him . . .
Read MoreLast week, Inside Higher Ed published an essay on “The Future of the University Quarterly.” In it, Joanne Diaz and Ian Morris (both editors themselves at university literary magazines), pointed to the perilous future that such journals face, and fretted that their demise in an age of university “cost-benefit analyses” seems near-certain. A penchant for “staid . . .
Read MoreA Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation (Parts One; Two; Three) Ilan Stavans: I became a teacher by default, Justin. I wanted to be next to books. What better way to spend one’s life is there? Almost three decades after that decision, I believe it was teaching that chose me and not . . .
Read MoreIn Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterful film, The Act of Killing, perpetrators are invited to re-imagine their role in Indonesian anti-communist massacres in the mid-1960s. The killers, having fashioned themselves after gangsters from American films, are eager to relive the glory years. Speaking freely about their crimes, they reenact the killings before the cameras, acting out . . .
Read MoreA Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation (Link to Part One)(Link to Part Two) Ilan Stavans: You read the biblical stories, it seems to me, to prove a higher morality; I, instead, see them as just stories. They are like Greek mythology: a constellation of characters doing human things in order to . . .
Read MoreA Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation (Link to Part One) Ilan Stavans: I’ve often been asked if I believe in God. You know, Justin, I confess to keep changing my mind, not because I don’t believe in God—do I, really?—but because I like counting the various options my mind is able . . .
Read MoreEditor’s Note: Three weeks after the recent events in Paris, as an article in yesterday’s Guardian points out, it’s hard not to make comparisons. Tana de Zulueta, a former member of parliament in Italy and a board member of Articolo 21, an Italian NGO supporting press freedoms, comments, “After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo . . .
Read MoreA Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation Rabbi Justin David: In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton says that “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell from heaven.” I want to talk to you about a number of perhaps disparate themes: God’s place in . . .
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