Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills--The Gettysburg Address Moved America from Constitutional Compromise to Aspiration

 

Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg is a short book with a large argument: that Abraham Lincoln, in just 272 words, redefined the meaning of the American republic. Wills’s central claim: the Gettysburg Address does not look to the Constitution as the nation’s founding document, but to the Declaration of Independence. In this address, Lincoln shifted the moral center of the United States from a framework of compromise to one of aspiration.

The Constitution, as Wills reminds us, is a document forged through political necessity—one that accommodated slavery in order to secure union. The Declaration, by contrast, proclaims a principle: that all men are created equal. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was to elevate that principle above the compromises of 1787 and to present it as the true foundation of the nation. “Four score and seven years ago” reaches back not to the Constitution’s ratification, but to 1776, reframing the Civil War as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality can endure.

Wills shows that this was not rhetorical flourish but the culmination of Lincoln’s evolving thought. Over the course of his career, Lincoln moved from a position of containing slavery to one of confronting its moral incompatibility with the nation’s founding ideals. Yet he never abandoned his primary objective: preserving the Union. In Lincoln’s mind, the Union and the principle of equality were not separate goals but intertwined ones. The Union gave political life to the Declaration’s promise; without it, the principle would remain abstract.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Confederacy as a separate nation. Even in the midst of a brutal war, Lincoln spoke and acted as the president of all Americans. Southerners were not foreigners but citizens engaged in rebellion—participants in what he viewed as an unlawful act against a legitimate government. This stance shaped both his wartime policies and the tone of the Gettysburg Address, which avoids vindictiveness and instead calls for “a new birth of freedom” that would bind the nation together more fully than before.

Wills also situates the address within its intellectual and cultural context, contrasting Lincoln’s spare, biblical language with the ornate oratory of his contemporaries. The result is a speech that feels both timeless and radical, quietly overturning the assumptions on which the nation had been built.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is ultimately a study in how ideas shape history. Wills demonstrates that Lincoln did not merely commemorate the dead at Gettysburg—he reinterpreted the American experiment itself, grounding it not in compromise, but in a moral vision that continues to define the country’s aspirations.

Beautiful, Suggestive, and Not Quite Convincing: A review of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

 Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth is an elegant, curious, and ultimately frustrating book. It sits at the intersection of science writing and philosophical speculation, and while it succeeds admirably at the former, it strains credibility in the latter.

Schlanger is at her best when she is simply observing. Her reporting on plant behavior—root systems exchanging chemical signals, leaves responding to touch, forests linked through underground fungal networks—is vivid and often mesmerizing. She has a gift for rendering the slow, silent life of plants into something legible and even dramatic. You come away with a sharpened sense that plants are not passive background but active participants in the ecosystems we barely notice.

Where the book begins to wobble is in its central claim: that these behaviors amount to something like intelligence. Schlanger builds her case through anecdotes and emerging research, but the leap from responsiveness to cognition is never fully justified. The evidence feels suggestive rather than conclusive, and at times the argument seems to run ahead of the science, leaning on metaphor where demonstration would be required.

That tension defines the book. It is never dull—far from it—but it leaves you unconvinced. You learn a great deal about how plants live, communicate, and adapt, yet the larger thesis remains just out of reach, more poetic than proven.

In the end, The Light Eaters is best read not as a definitive account of plant intelligence, but as an invitation to rethink how we define life and awareness. It opens a door, but it does not quite walk you through it.

Einstein's Cosmos by Michio Kaku

 

Michio Kaku’s Einstein’s Cosmos is a lively, accessible tribute to the great physicist that mixes biography with clear explanations of the physics that made Einstein’s name synonymous with modern science. As a first-time Kaku reader, I appreciated his engaging, conversational voice—brisk storytelling, vivid analogies, and just enough technical detail to illuminate without bogging the reader down.

A central theme of the book is how many of Einstein’s most daring ideas anticipated discoveries that wouldn’t be confirmed until decades after his death. Kaku does an excellent job highlighting those prescient insights and the ways Einstein’s intuition outpaced the experimental technology of his era.

Gravitational waves are a standout example. Einstein’s general relativity mathematically admits ripples in spacetime, but the notion of real, detectable waves was controversial and even confusing in his lifetime; Einstein himself wavered on their physical reality. Kaku traces the theory’s development and the long experimental road that ended with LIGO’s 2015 detection—an observation Einstein could not have witnessed, yet one that vindicated a fundamental prediction of his theory.

Black holes are another major case. The Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s equations appeared within a year of general relativity, but the idea of a physically real object from which not even light can escape seemed almost science-fictional then. Einstein resisted the notion of singularities and collapsed stars; still, his equations implied them. Kaku shows how later theoretical work and astronomical observations—accretion disks, X-ray binaries, and the imaging of a black hole’s shadow—confirmed what the mathematics had already suggested.

Kaku also explores gravitational lensing and gravitational redshift—phenomena predicted by general relativity that were difficult to test with early 20th-century instruments. The 1919 Eddington expedition began confirming light-bending, but precise, wide-ranging confirmations came much later, and precise applications (like GPS time corrections) are entirely post‑Einstein technologies. Kaku frames these developments as part of a pattern: Einstein supplied a conceptual framework so profound that it required future generations and instruments to fully validate and exploit it.

Throughout, Kaku emphasizes Einstein’s creative process—thought experiments, stubborn skepticism, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. The book blends human detail with scientific exposition in a way that makes complex ideas feel graspable.

If you’re looking for an approachable, well-written account that honors both Einstein’s genius and the later triumphs his theories enabled, Kaku’s Einstein’s Cosmos is a rewarding read.

My Mascot Life

 

I just gave away the tuxedo I bought in 2004. I hadn’t worn it since 2013, so it felt like time to let it go to a better home. Over the years I used it several times a year for black‑tie award ceremonies at the museum where I worked. But its best use came in 2007, when I became the mascot for two weeks during the longest championship run for the girls basketball team in Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS) history.

Why was a 54‑year‑old dad the team mascot? Because I showed up to the first round of the championship wearing a tuxedo. I had planned to go straight to a black‑tie awards event in Philadelphia after the game, so I went to the gym dressed for the evening. The team—my two daughters included, both guards (Lauren a senior, Lisa a sophomore)—won that first round. As soon as the game ended, the whole squad ran up and insisted I wear the tuxedo to the next round because I was “good luck.”

From that moment on, the tux became my game uniform. LCDS won the next three rounds and became district champions, earning a trip to the state tournament. We traveled to central Pennsylvania to play Mansfield—a perennial powerhouse from a school with graduating classes of over 250, compared with LCDS’s 40. Whatever luck the tuxedo had ran out on Mansfield; the final was a rout. Still, making it to states was a victory in itself.

Maybe my tux will bring someone else luck someday. For me, it will always be the suit that cheered my daughters on during their team's greatest season.

Carl Lutz, Visas for Life, and Eric Saul

Eric Saul (tall man in the middle) at Arch Street Friends Meeting House

At the end of March I went to a presentation titled:

Visas For Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats

held at the Arch Street Friends Meeting House.  The event focused on Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat in Budapest who rescued 62,000 Jews from the Holocaust. At the center of research and publication of work about Lutz and other diplomats who rescued Jews is Eric Saul, one of the speakers at the event.

I was not aware that anyone had rescued that many Jews from Hitler and his horrible minions.  And I think of Budapest as one of the worst sites in the tragedy of that is The Holocaust.  In just a few months in the middle of 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to Auschwitz and other death camps.  Adolph Eichmann reached his peak of evil efficiency in Budapest in 1944.  It was happily stunning to find that an epic rescue was going on at the same. 

I will be writing more about this program and about Saul later in the year.  At this time of the year when the world marks the end of the Holocaust and of World War II in Europe, I was delighted to learn about a heroic action I had not previously been aware of.  

 

Yiyang Zhuge: Translating Hannah Arendt Across Worlds

 

Yiyang Zhuge translator of Hannah Arendt and Plutarch

At a recent conversation hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center in New York City, Roger Berkowitz interviewed Yiyang Zhuge. Her work represents a remarkable intellectual bridge between languages, traditions, and political worlds. Still a graduate student at Boston College, Zhuge has already emerged as a significant figure in bringing Western political thought—especially the work of Hannah Arendt—to contemporary Chinese readers.

Roger Berkowitz and Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s recent translation of The Human Condition into Mandarin, published this year in China, has already sold 15,000 copies—an impressive number for a dense philosophical text. The year before, her translation of Plutarch’s Moralia reached an even wider audience, with 36,000 copies sold. These numbers suggest not only the quality of her work but also a growing appetite among Chinese readers for classical and modern texts that explore politics, ethics, and the human condition.

Plutrach's Moralia translated from Greek to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

What makes Zhuge’s work even more striking is the path that led her there. She came to the United States at the age of fifteen and attended a private high  school with little knowledge of English. In an environment where she faced social difficulties, language itself became both refuge and passion. She immersed herself in study, mastering not only English but also Greek, Latin, and German. That linguistic range enabled her to translate Arendt not from English but from German.  Arendt wrote her major works in both English and German. Zhuge and Berkowitz mentioned some of the differences between the German and English version of The Human Condition including Arendt’s quotations of German poetry in the edition she wrote in German. 

The Human Condition translated from German to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s work is not limited to translation. She has built a substantial following through a Mandarin-language YouTube channel where she discusses politics and feminism. In doing so, she participates in a broader intellectual project: creating a space for political thought that crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her translations and public engagement bring thinkers like Arendt into conversation with contemporary Chinese audiences, where questions of authority, freedom, and public life carry particular urgency.

Zhuge's translation of Men in Dark Times will be published later in 2026 

Her current effort to publish a Mandarin translation of Men in Dark Times highlights the challenges of that project. The text, with its reflections on individuals who maintained moral clarity under oppressive conditions, must pass through China’s censorship process. That negotiation itself underscores the stakes of Zhuge’s work. Translation under censorship is not only an intellectual exercise but also a political act.

Zhuge’s story highlights language as a form of freedom. From a teenager struggling to find her place in a new country to a scholar translating some political philosophy from the 20h century and the ancient world, she has turned linguistic mastery into a means of connection and influence. In bringing Arendt into Mandarin, she is not only translating words but opening a space for thought—one that, like Arendt’s own work, insists on the importance of thinking in difficult times.

Hoping Against Facts: Belief in Progress

 

The end of the Cold War seemed, for a brief moment, to vindicate the modern belief in progress. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed not only politically but historically. Communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe, democratic institutions spread, and markets opened. It appeared that history itself was moving in a clear direction. The twentieth century’s ideological struggle had ended, and democracy had won.

Yet the decades that followed quickly complicated that confidence. Events after the Cold War increasingly suggested that the belief in inevitable progress—so sharply criticized by Hannah Arendt—rested on far shakier ground than many assumed.

One of the earliest signs appeared in Russia itself. After the Soviet collapse, many hoped the country would evolve toward stable democracy. Instead, the brutal First Chechen War revealed how fragile the new order was. Violence, corruption, and political instability quickly undermined the democratic experiment. Within a decade, Russia had moved toward the centralized authoritarianism that defines it today.

China offered another early warning. While Western observers sometimes hoped that economic liberalization would eventually lead to political openness, the Chinese Communist Party made its intentions unmistakably clear during the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. The violent suppression of democratic protests demonstrated that economic modernization did not necessarily produce political freedom. China would grow richer and more powerful, but not more democratic.

The optimism of the early 1990s suffered another blow with the terrorist attacks of September 11 attacks. The attacks revealed that ideological conflict had not disappeared with the Cold War. Instead, new forms of global struggle—rooted in religious extremism and geopolitical instability—had emerged. The wars that followed reshaped global politics and exposed the limits of American power to shape political outcomes abroad.

The Middle East seemed briefly to challenge this pessimism during the Arab Spring. Mass protests toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, raising hopes that democratic reform might finally take root across the region. Yet those hopes proved fragile. In many countries the uprisings gave way to civil war, renewed authoritarianism, or political chaos. The dream of a democratic Middle East faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

Even within established democracies, confidence in steady progress began to erode. By the mid-2010s, political polarization, populist movements, and declining trust in institutions signaled growing strain within democratic systems themselves. In countries long considered stable, including the United States, political norms that once seemed secure began to look more vulnerable.

Taken together, these developments illustrate a central insight of Arendt’s political thought. In works such as On Violence and The Human Condition, she warned against the comforting belief that history moves automatically toward improvement. Scientific and technological progress may advance steadily, but political life does not follow the same pattern. Human institutions remain fragile because they depend on human action—choices made by citizens, leaders, and societies.

The events of the past three decades underscore her point. Moments that seemed to confirm the triumph of democracy turned out to be temporary openings rather than permanent transformations. Progress, if it exists at all, must be continually defended and renewed.

Arendt did not deny the possibility of improvement. She believed that human beings possess the capacity to create new political beginnings through collective action. But she insisted that such achievements are never guaranteed. Freedom and democratic institutions survive only when people actively sustain them.

The decades since the Cold War have shown how quickly optimism about historical progress can fade. They have also reminded us of Arendt’s deeper lesson: history does not move forward by necessity. Its direction remains open, shaped by the decisions people make in their own time.