Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

04/24/2025

In our spring issue, Durs Grünbein shares cautionary echoes in prose and poetry.

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“Still Life with Mice,” Ludovico de Susio, 1619.

04/21/2025

One week from tomorrow, we will gather to celebrate the last 5 years and look forward to the next, hosted by . Don’t miss it! Tickets here: https://www.92ny.org/event/liberties-journal

04/17/2025

Find this poem in full (alongside 3 others also by Paula Bohince) in our spring issue.

Subscribe and read on our site: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/young-lady-in-1886/

04/15/2025

on Liberties Sidebar:

“Yet these voices remain unheard. Gazans have come to realize, many for the first time, that the world’s concern for Gaza has never truly been about its people — but about Gaza itself. Self proclaimed allies of Gazans were silent when the aggressor brutally slaughtering civilians was Hamas rather than Israel. These protests exposed the hollowness of Western progressive’s supposed solidarity. Even under the bombs, when Gazans cried out against Hamas, their voices were ignored.

During the protests, children in Gaza were seen in a video chanting, ‘We want to live, we don’t want to die.’ Their words were a direct response to two chilling statements. One came from Youssef Hamdan, a Hamas leader and the son of Osama Hamdan, who appeared in a video saying that Hamas has no fabric to raise a white flag — but plenty to shroud the bodies of children. In other words, the group would fight to the last Gazan child. The second statement came from a Hamas-affiliated analyst who appears almost daily on Al Jazeera, declaring that ‘we have no choice but to fight with the flesh of Gaza’s children.’ This nihilistic view toward the children of Gaza pushed those very children to respond in the simplest and most powerful way: we want to live in peace — we do not want to die.”

04/15/2025

Coming up later this month in NYC… don’t miss it!

Tickets available here: https://www.92ny.org/event/liberties-journal

04/14/2025

04/11/2025

In our Spring 2025 issue, Yaroslav Hrytsak writes on the surprising lessons of setting the Ukrainian war in the context of history.

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“Still Life With Fruit, Goblet, and Canary (Nature’s Bounty),” Severin Roesen, 1851.

04/09/2025

Our spring issue is out now.

04/03/2025

On this day in 1968 MLK delivered his stirring and painfully relevant “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. That’s on our mind while reading Andrew Marzoni’s () brilliant essay “Freelance Blues: James Baldwin in the Magazines.” Read it in full on Liberties Sidebar today.

03/31/2025

On Liberties Sidebar, laments the dearth of well-deserved criticism in couture fashion and looks at the role of such criticism in our current political climate.

Read now at the link in our story.

03/20/2025

In our winter issue, Leon Wieseltier ponders the ways in which metaphysics makes life in the physical world bearable. Subscribe and read now.

“Sunrise, near the Cape,” Andrew Nicholl, 1844.

03/17/2025

New on Liberties Sidebar—read the rest of Henry Oliver’s piece on the transgressive holiness and redemption that’s wrapped in the lushly-styled prose of “Brideshead Revisited” at the link in our story.

03/14/2025

Read anywhere. Read everywhere. Read “Liberties.”

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03/12/2025

New on Liberties Sidebar, read the rest of ’s second installment in his ongoing series “Mannhood,” on all things related to Thomas Mann, which will continue throughout 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth. Link in story.

03/07/2025

New on Liberties Sidebar:

“While the usual gaggle of liberal commentators have spent their time worrying about, well, the lack of liberalism in the Trump administration — indeed, Trump and his cohort have no scruples about trampling on free speech, threatening prosecutors and members of Congress, and sending teenagers to handle sensitive information — the same liberals have been slow to condemn the fascistic way that this administration uses law enforcement because the Democrats have a similar relationship to the police.”

Read the rest of Jessica Pishko’s piece on Democrat complicity in police violence and the dangerous rise of an increasingly militarized police force on our site now.

03/06/2025

Upcoming in DC: please join us!

RSVP link in story.

03/04/2025

Read the rest of ’s reckoning with the cultural cost of secularism in our winter issue.

Link in story.