In these perilous times, when disastrous new edicts are being pronounced, it seems, on an hourly basis, it’s hard to remember that there’s more to the newspaper than its international and domestic news sections. Despite the fact that I’m a serious book hugger, I’ve been neglecting the Books section of the Sunday New York Times, but one day a few weeks ago I sought refuge in its pages, where I...
I was at work on a personal piece for next week’s posting when I was derailed in a most fortunate way. Here’s what happened. We had invited some of our favorite people to dinner – Adrienne Lieberman and her husband Andy Thomas, along with Mark and Mary Larson. We had managed to go deep into the evening without venturing onto the Trump/Musk ice floe before plunging into those frigid waters. It’s...
In the university world and particularly at the University of Chicago, the name Kalven is often reverentially invoked. Harry Kalven was a professor of Constitutional Law at the UofC. In 1967 he headed a commission that issued a report that called for the University’s neutrality on public issues. Kalven’s primary interest was freedom of speech, and the major argument of the Kalven Report was that...
Around the time of Donald Trump’s first election victory, Timothy Snyder published a book that was small enough to fit in my back pocket, but which packed a War and Peace-sized wallop. I’m sure most of you are already familiar with both the author and the book but for those who aren’t, Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University, and On Tyranny is a distillation of the lessons he’s...