Essays

But the question remains: Why was the Palace of the Soviets to be erected precisely where the Temple of Christ the Saviour had stood? (Let us add that the temple stood on extremely poor ground, porous and constantly underrun by water. It was treacherous soil for building on, pushing up the costs of construction.)

The explanation that atheism now... See more

What do they say? Nothing at all. Life goes on. In the morning, adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and more frequently, a family member is taken away, now a friend from work, now a neighbor. That’s life. Only the residents of houses next door to the temple seem to take an interest. In spare moments,... See more

Trump seemed unmoved by his divine destiny: the messiah, after all, is an unpaid position. More mysterious is why Parnas — a transnational criminal until he was caught — and his son came to be leading operatives for the Democratic Party during Biden’s term.

One cannot understand the Iran War without understanding the Kahanists. But I rarely see analysts mention them. Maybe they did, and it was behind a paywall. If a war crime is subscription-only, does it make a sound? Is that sound a stifled scream?

In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; now war serves the purposes of propaganda. But the blood remains real.

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in... See more

The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are... See more

The redemption arc, in clumsy hands, becomes cheesy and unbelievable, offending good taste more often than not. Granted. But literature has, in the past, found ways to handle this sort of plot delicately, and to great effect. After all, the question of how a person changes ought to absolutely possess a novelist – as a matter of philosophical... See more

Poetry is an essential part of society—but only as itself and not as a vehicle for something else.