Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

Michael Ignatieff’s most recent book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.Mary Gaitskill is the author, among other books, of Bad Behavior and This Is Pleasure.Sergei Lebedev is a Russian novelist and the author of Oblivion and Untraceable. This essay was translated by Antonina W. Bouis.Karen Solie is a Canadian poet whose most recent book is The Caiplie Caves.Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His new book The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective will be published in January.David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris.Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and the author most recently of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. Adam Zagajewski, who died in 2021, was an acclaimed Polish poet. The poems in this issue were translated by Clare Cavanagh. Andrew Scull is a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.Robert Alter is professor emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at University of California at Berkeley.Steven B. Smith is a professor of political science at Yale University and the author most recently of Modernity and its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. Benjamin Moser is a writer and translator, and the author most recently of Sontag: Her Life and Work.Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor emerita at Harvard University. Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties.Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties.