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.

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.

Geography, War, and Power: Ian Morris’s Grand Argument

 

Across Why the West Rules, for Now, War! What Is It Good For?, and Geography Is Destiny, historian Ian Morris advances one of the most ambitious arguments in contemporary historical writing: geography shapes human possibilities; war accelerates political organization; and power flows toward regions best positioned to exploit both.

Each book stands alone. Together, they form a coherent trilogy about how civilizations rise, dominate, and eventually yield.

1. Why the West Rules, for Now

In Why the West Rules, for Now, Morris asks the question that animates much global history: why did Western Europe, rather than China or India, come to dominate the modern world? His answer rejects racial or cultural superiority. Instead, he proposes a measurable index of “social development,” tracking energy capture, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity over 15,000 years.

The core claim: geography determines which societies have access to the resources, domesticable plants and animals, navigable waterways, and communication networks that allow complexity to scale. For centuries, China led. Then Europe’s fragmented geography and Atlantic position created competitive pressures and maritime advantages that propelled it forward. Western dominance, in Morris’s telling, is neither destiny nor virtue. It is a phase.

The “for now” matters. The title already anticipates decline.

2. War! What Is It Good For?

If Why the West Rules maps long-term development, War! tackles a more uncomfortable thesis: large-scale warfare has historically made societies safer.

Morris does not romanticize violence. He argues that throughout history, bigger and bloodier wars have tended to create larger political units — empires and states — that suppress smaller-scale violence. The Roman Empire, the Qin and Han dynasties, early modern European state formation — all demonstrate that consolidation through war reduces the frequency of everyday killing.

The modern world’s relative safety, he suggests, rests on centuries of brutal state-building. War is not good in itself. It is good at forcing cooperation and creating Leviathans capable of imposing order.

Read alongside Why the West Rules, the logic tightens: geography creates opportunities; competition turns violent; war builds larger structures; those structures increase social development.

3. Geography Is Destiny

In Geography Is Destiny, Morris narrows his focus to Britain. The book is smaller in geographic scope but just as sweeping chronologically. Here he tests his thesis against a single case: the United Kingdom.

Britain’s island geography, he argues, made it simultaneously European and separate from Europe. The English Channel fostered political independence while proximity guaranteed entanglement. Over 8,000 years, Britain oscillated between integration and distance. Brexit, in this framework, is not a rupture but a recurring pattern.

Morris invokes what he calls “Thatcher’s Law”: Britain is part of Europe, like it or not. Geography constrains identity politics. The island does not move.

The book also revisits themes from his earlier works. Britain’s imperial ascent stemmed from geographic advantages in Atlantic trade and naval projection. Its imperial collapse followed the massive costs of industrialized war in the twentieth century. Geography enabled empire; geopolitics destroyed it.

But the final move of Geography Is Destiny expands outward. Morris argues that Brexit debates miss the larger transformation underway. The real structural shift is the rise of China. Just as Why the West Rules suggested Western dominance was temporary, Geography Is Destiny hints that the world’s center of gravity is moving back toward East Asia. China calling itself the “Middle Kingdom” is not mere poetry; it reflects long-term civilizational centrality.

The Through-Line

Taken together, the three books make a disciplined argument against short-term thinking.

• Geography shapes opportunity.

• Competition produces war.

• War builds states.

• States dominate until geography and development shift advantage elsewhere.

Morris consistently refuses cultural triumphalism. Western dominance was contingent, not permanent. Britain’s imperial power was structural, not eternal. China’s resurgence may represent reversion rather than revolution.

What makes Morris compelling is scale. He is not distracted by electoral cycles or policy squabbles. He looks at millennia. That long view is unsettling. It suggests that national debates — over Brexit, NATO, American decline — are ripples atop tectonic plates.

If Why the West Rules explains how the West rose, and War! explains the violent machinery behind state power, Geography Is Destiny asks what happens when geography shifts the balance again.

The trilogy leaves readers with a sobering possibility: the West’s “for now” may be ending, not because of moral failure alone, but because geography and development are rebalancing the world.

Morris does not celebrate this. He simply traces it.

That clarity — unsentimental, structural, and expansive — is what makes his work so compelling.

"Until August" by Gabriel García Márquez: A Review

 

Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August (En agosto nos vemos), published more than a decade after his death, is a slender, lovely final story from one of the greatest literary voices of the 20th century. Completed in its fifth draft before 2004 but left unfinished due to the onset of dementia, the novella was ultimately published in 2024 with the blessing of Márquez’s sons, who recognized that despite its incompletion, the work pulsed with the unmistakable rhythm and sensuality of their father’s voice. They were right.

Until August is the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman who travels alone each year to the island where her mother is buried, always on the same day in August. What begins as a yearly pilgrimage for remembrance soon becomes something more complicated—and more human. On these trips, she seeks out fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters with strangers, as if trying to match death’s finality with life’s immediacy.

There’s a breezy elegance to the prose, rendered here in a fluid English translation that captures Márquez’s tone of amused omniscience. The story unfolds like one of his most memorable sentences: long, winding, sensual, and deceptively simple. Though lacking the baroque sprawl of One Hundred Years of Solitude or the epic weight of Love in the Time of Cholera, this novella feels unmistakably Márquezian in its use of repetition, earthy realism, and wry eroticism. It’s a tale of aging and desire, of memory and reinvention, and perhaps above all, of the disobedient persistence of the body.

Reading Until August, I had the feeling (how could I really know) that Márquez understood women’s inner lives—how desire in his stories is never reduced to biology or scandal but portrayed instead as an assertion of freedom, of life against decay. Ana’s secret annual ritual is not framed as transgression but as a quiet rebellion against the slow death of domesticity and predictability. Her story unfolds in tones that are light, melancholic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. At one moment, Ana wonders if her husband suspects anything; at another, she is misplacing her panties on a hotel balcony with almost childlike innocence. Márquez allows her to be contradictory, self-deceiving, and utterly alive.

The circumstances of the book’s publication inevitably invite questions. Did Márquez want this released? Would he have changed the structure, added more? His sons say he lost the ability to revise due to advancing dementia, and it’s clear this is not a polished final novel. But what’s also clear is that the material hums with vitality. 

SPOILER

In the final paragraph of the novel I was convinced it was, except for polishing, a complete work.  Ana comes home from her last night on the island (no love the last year) with a sack of bones that is her mother's earthly remains. Her return to home and her husband with mom's bones in a sack echoes the floating bodies in the river beside the ship as the lover's escape at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera. 

Until August is a sharp meditation on aging, love, and autonomy. It may not be his greatest work, but it is very good, offering one final glimpse of that unmistakable magic that only García Márquez could conjure. 

Why I Am No Longer a Democrat

 

Torch carrying Nazis at the Unite the Right Rally

In 2017, torch-carrying neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.” It was open, unapologetic antisemitism. No decoding required.

Protesters in NYC chanting "We support Hamas here."

Recently, protesters have stood outside American synagogues chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and “We support Hamas here.” Different slogans. Different political tribe. Same moral rot.

Which is worse?

Neither. Both.

Both are expressions of political extremism that normalize hostility toward Jews. Both use intimidation. Both test whether the broader political movements around them have the courage to draw lines.

When Charlottesville happened, mainstream conservatives were forced to confront the ugliness on their fringe. Many failed. Some succeeded. But the hatred was unmistakable and widely condemned.

What I have watched in recent months unsettled me more deeply: the hesitation — and in some quarters the open tolerance — within segments of the progressive left when antisemitic rhetoric shows up wrapped in activist language.

If you chant outside a synagogue in America and echo slogans of a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, you don’t get to hide behind moral nuance. That’s intimidation. That's hate. Period.

The final break for me wasn’t just about Gaza. It was about selective outrage.

We are told constantly that Gaza is a genocide. That word is used with moral thunder. But where is the sustained outrage over Iran’s repression of its own people? Where is the relentless campus mobilization over Kurdish persecution? Over Boko Haram’s violence? Over the industrial-scale destruction of Ukraine by Russia?

When human-rights language becomes selective — deployed ferociously in one case and cautiously in others — it stops looking universal. It's tribal.

Civilian suffering in Gaza is tragic. So is civilian suffering in Tehran. So is civilian suffering in Kyiv. If you want to invoke genocide, liberation, colonialism, or resistance, then apply those principles consistently.

Instead, in too many progressive spaces, denunciations of Israel have become a loyalty test. In some local Democratic politics, candidates are pressured to declare Israel guilty of genocide or face political exile. That isn’t debate. That’s hate.

And yes — I know the rebuttal. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. Of course it isn’t. Governments are not immune from criticism.

But when protests target synagogues instead of embassies, when chants mirror the language of groups committed to Jewish eradication, and when Jewish students are told they must renounce Zionism to feel safe on campus, something has gone very wrong.

That is why I left the Democratic Party.

Not because I drifted right. Not because I have forgotten January 6th. Not because I am blind to extremism on the Republican side.

I left because I refuse to belong to a coalition that cannot decisively confront antisemitism when it appears inside its own ranks.

At the same time, I am not a Republican. The nationalist right has its own flirtations with illiberalism, its own conspiracies, its own moral evasions.

Which leaves me politically homeless.

The greatest threats to global stability today are militant Islamist extremism and Vladimir Putin’s effort to rebuild Russian imperial power. Any movement that clearly and consistently opposes both — without apologies, without selective outrage — would have my loyalty.

Until then, I will stand outside party lines.

I will support Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

I will support the people of Iran fighting a regime that brutalizes them.

I will oppose antisemitism whether it wears a swastika or waves a Hamas flag.

I do not belong to either party.

I belong to consistency in fighting hate.

Musée Marmottan Monet: History, Collection, and Serene Beauty

 Tucked away in Paris's 16th arrondissement, the Musée Marmottan Monet is one of city's quietly beautiful museums. It lacks the crowds and theatricality of the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, but what it offers instead is intimacy—an experience that feels less like visiting a museum than like being welcomed into the private world of Impressionism.

The museum began not as a shrine to Monet, but as the private residence of Paul Marmottan, a late-19th-century historian and collector with a passion for the Napoleonic era. His home housed an exceptional collection of First Empire furniture, paintings, and decorative arts. When Marmottan died in 1932, he bequeathed the house and his collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, transforming it into a museum. Over time, however, its identity shifted dramatically—thanks to a series of transformative donations.

The most important of these came from Michel Monet, Claude Monet’s younger son. In 1966, he donated his father’s personal collection to the museum, instantly making the Marmottan the world’s leading repository of Monet’s work. This gift included paintings Monet had kept for himself—works never intended for sale or exhibition. Among them is Impression, soleil levant, the painting that gave Impressionism its name and that now anchors the museum’s identity.

Nowhere is Monet’s presence more deeply felt than on the lower floor, where the late Nymphéas—the water lilies—are displayed. These paintings are immersive rather than declarative. Hung low and spread across walls, they invite prolonged looking rather than quick recognition. Here, Monet’s obsession with light, reflection, and time unfolds in endless variation: lilies dissolving into color, water becoming sky, form hovering at the edge of abstraction. Sitting before them, I felt one senses not spectacle but persistence—the result of decades of seeing and re-seeing the same pond as vision itself aged and changed.

Upstairs, the museum opens into a different but equally compelling chapter of Impressionism through its exceptional holdings of Berthe Morisot. Thanks largely to donations from Morisot’s descendants, the Marmottan houses the most important collection of her work anywhere. These paintings—intimate, luminous, and psychologically acute—offer a corrective to the old narrative that cast Morisot as a “minor” Impressionist. Her portraits and domestic scenes reveal an artist of extraordinary subtlety, capturing the textures of women’s lives with brushwork that is as daring as Monet’s but more inward in tone.

What makes the Musée Marmottan Monet so affecting is precisely this balance. It is not a museum of manifestos or movements, but of sustained attention. Monet’s water lilies reward stillness. Morisot’s paintings reward empathy. 

The Napoleonic rooms remind visitors of the museum’s origins as a private home, grounding the experience in lived space rather than monumental display.

Leaving the Marmottan, I was not overwhelmed. I felt peaceful, immersed in the soft landscapes that Monet and Morisot gave me. It is a museum built for lingering. I sat for a long time amid the water lilies letting myself be transported to Givenchy. 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

With reflections on Casey Cep’s introduction and Faulkner’s racial legacy

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like tumbling down a well into someone else’s madness—brilliant, disorienting, and claustrophobic. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel is widely considered a masterwork of literary modernism, and it earns that title with its shattered chronology, fractured voices, and poetic density. Faulkner demands that the reader abandon logic and surrender to rhythm, memory, and emotion. I admire the brilliance of what he accomplished. But as the father of two Black sons, I found reading this book almost unbearable.

My edition included a powerful introduction by New Yorker critic Casey Cep. She writes:

“Faulkner loved Mississippi in the way that only someone who has given his whole life to a place can love it—without irony, without detachment, and without apology. That love gives his novels their power and also their poison.”

That passage stayed with me more than anything in the novel itself. Because Faulkner’s love for Mississippi is everywhere in this book—not just its trees and rivers, but its hierarchies, its violence, its unspoken rules. He does not celebrate racism, but he lives inside it, unchallenged. The Black characters in The Sound and the Fury—Dilsey most of all—are relegated to the edges, mute supports for the crumbling white Compson family. Faulkner offers them no interiority, no freedom, no choice. And yet he mourns the Compsons like a tragic fall from grace.

What grace?

Faulkner once said, “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Later, he tried to walk that back, but the damage was done. That loyalty—to a world built on subjugation—makes it impossible for me to embrace him, no matter how intricate his prose or how inventive his narrative structure.

There are moments of undeniable power. Benjy’s disordered narration captures the chaos of loss with brutal immediacy. Quentin’s suicide unspools in a voice haunted by honor and failure. Jason, the bitter misogynist and racist, is Faulkner’s clearest indictment of the postbellum Southern man—mean, empty, desperate. And Dilsey, the Black servant, is portrayed with dignity, even if she is denied agency.

But dignity is not justice.

Reading Faulkner, I could never shake the feeling that I was inside a eulogy for a world I would never want my sons to live in. A world where their safety, their futures, and their very humanity would be conditional—if acknowledged at all.

I’m glad I read The Sound and the Fury. I understand why it is studied and revered. But Faulkner’s genius walks hand in hand with his blind spots. As Casey Cep notes, his love for Mississippi was both his strength and his undoing. For me, that’s too steep a price.

Brilliance, when rooted in a poisoned soil, can still grow thorns.

Anselm Kiefer in the Panthéon--The first major new art installation in the Pantheon in a century

 

I returned to the Panthéon after previous visits over the past decade, to see the first new art exhibit in crypt of the Republic in a century.  And the exhibit is by a German  artist!— Anselm Kiefer. Six vast glass vitrines catching the cold light from the dome, full of wreckage and silence.

I walk into the Panthéon patriotism, heroic scale; the new exhibit by Kiefer is frailty and fragility and pain enclosed in glass. Commissioned for the 2020 panthéonisation of Maurice Genevoix, author of Ceux de 14, the German artist installed six towering glass-and-steel vitrines—now permanent—plus two large canvases that were shown on loan. In the six enclosures are rusted barbed wire, scorched garments, lead books, concrete shards, and sprigs of wheat sit in suspended collision, as if a battlefield had been archived rather than cleaned up.

The materials aren’t metaphors; they’re blunt instruments sharply contrasting celebration of heroes. The Pantheon is France’s national crypt of heroes—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Curie—built to canonize clarity. Keifer's vitrines are enclosed chaos, monuments for a century that never stopped bleeding, a counter-monument to the patriotic and heroic. The work keys directly off Genevoix’s witness to the Great War; phrases from Ceux de 14 (so I have read about this book of World War I) run through the installations like exposed wiring. You don’t admire these pieces so much as absorb shock from them.

This is the first major new art commission in the Panthéon in nearly a century—the last comparable addition was Bouchard’s 1924 memorial. Kiefer isn’t just adding objects; he’s reopening the monument after a hundred years of stasis.

The clash between neoclassical order and Kiefer’s scorched-earth art is dramatic. The vitrines are not subtle. Kiefer puts the horror of war in the midst of patriotic celebration, a new dimension in this room that is the French nation’s memory chamber.

Standing in the great hall, I thought of how I was drawn to the patriotic and heroic sinceI was a child, but then saw the ruin and wreckage that is actual war. Kiefer puts the horror front and center in contrast to the beauty and majesty of the rest of the building and its art.

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the Moral Backbone of the American Founders

 

When Marcus Tullius Cicero retreated to his villa at Tusculum in 45 B.C., he was a man in mourning. His daughter Tullia had died, the Roman Republic was collapsing into dictatorship, and his public voice—once Rome’s conscience—was being silenced. In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero turned from politics to philosophy, trying to answer a question that has haunted thinkers ever since: how can the soul find peace amid loss, injustice, and mortality? His answer, grounded in Stoicism and Roman virtue, became a handbook for enduring adversity with dignity. Eighteen centuries later, that same book helped shape a new republic across the Atlantic.

The American Founders’ Roman Education

The American founders did not just admire Cicero—they lived in his intellectual world. Latin was the bedrock of their education. They read De Officiis, De Re Publica, and Tusculan Disputations as moral training, not antiquarian study. George Washington, who lacked formal classical schooling, nevertheless absorbed Cicero’s Stoic lessons through his voracious reading and through the culture of republican virtue that the ancients infused into the colonies. Washington’s biographers record that he owned and reread the Tusculan Disputations, keeping it among his most personal books. His calm endurance during Valley Forge, his refusal of a crown, and his farewell to public life all echo Cicero’s vision of the wise man who rules himself.

John Adams, the philosopher of the Revolution, read Cicero in the original Latin. He quoted him incessantly in letters to his son and to Jefferson. Adams saw in Cicero a model of the citizen-orator—one who speaks truth to corruption and whose virtue is tested by exile and defeat. “All the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character,” Adams wrote. Jefferson agreed, calling Cicero’s writings “the most precious repository of ethics that ever was written.” Benjamin Franklin, too, drew upon the Stoic calm and self-discipline that Cicero praised; his Poor Richard’s Almanack distilled ancient maxims into a distinctly American vernacular.

Philosophy for a Republic

The Tusculan Disputations are structured as five dialogues, each exploring how philosophy can heal the soul: overcoming the fear of death, bearing pain, moderating grief, mastering passion, and cultivating virtue. Cicero argues that happiness depends on the soul’s independence from fortune. The wise man does not deny pain or injustice; he transcends them through reason and moral habit. Virtue, not pleasure or wealth, is the only true good.

These ideas became the ethical grammar of the founders. In a world without kings, they needed an inner monarchy—a self-governing conscience. Cicero’s insistence that liberty depends on virtue provided the philosophical foundation for republican government. As Washington put it in his Farewell Address, “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” That sentiment is lifted almost directly from Cicero’s moral writings.

The Tusculans also taught the founders a disciplined approach to emotion. Cicero, mourning his daughter, reasoned that grief must be tamed, not indulged. “The wise man,” he wrote, “will not be broken by sorrow.” Washington’s stoic reserve—the restraint that baffled and impressed his contemporaries—was not emotional vacancy but moral discipline. It was the Roman ideal transposed into the wilderness of the New World.

From Roman Virtue to American Character

The founders’ world was steeped in Roman imagery. The Senate, the Republic, the eagle, the fasces—all came from the classical vocabulary of power tempered by reason. But Cicero’s influence went deeper than symbols. His Tusculan Disputations taught that the state is only as sound as the souls who compose it. Liberty cannot survive without self-command. The book became, for the founders, a moral exercise—a way to prepare the mind for civic duty.

Adams, who often despaired of democracy’s passions, leaned on Cicero’s faith in rational discourse. Jefferson, despite his Enlightenment optimism, drew on Cicero’s belief that nature itself prescribes virtue. Even Franklin’s pragmatism—the idea that moral improvement comes through habit and self-examination—echoes Cicero’s advice that philosophy is practice, not theory.

When Washington surrendered his commission at Annapolis in 1783, he enacted a Ciceronian drama: the virtuous man relinquishing power to save the republic. Cicero had failed to save Rome; Washington succeeded, at least for a time, in embodying what Cicero imagined—the statesman guided by reason, uncorrupted by ambition, serene before fate.

Why It Still Matters

Reading Tusculan Disputations today, we feel both the distance of centuries and the immediacy of its counsel. Cicero’s Rome fell; America endures, but not without strain. The founders believed that philosophy could fortify freedom, that private virtue was the public armor of a republic. Their debt to Cicero is not academic—it is existential. As long as Americans prize liberty, they inherit the same challenge that haunted Cicero: how to remain free inside, even when the world convulses outside.

Cicero wrote to console himself. The founders read him to strengthen a nation. In both cases, Tusculan Disputations proved that wisdom is the republic’s first defense.

The Five Dialogues of Tusculan Disputations

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (45 B.C.) are organized into five books, each a conversation between Cicero and an unnamed interlocutor. The purpose of each dialogue is practical—how philosophy can train the soul to rise above fear, pain, and misfortune.

Book I: On Contempt of Death.
Cicero opens with the bold claim that death is not an evil. The soul, he argues, is immortal—or if it is not, then oblivion is no harm. Fear of death enslaves the mind; freedom begins with accepting mortality.

Book II: On Bearing Pain.
Here Cicero fuses Stoic and Platonic ideas: pain is endurable because it touches the body, not the soul. Virtue consists in fortitude—the mastery of sensation by reason.

Book III: On Grief.
Written while mourning his daughter Tullia, this section turns personal. Cicero insists grief must yield to discipline and reason. Excessive sorrow, he says, dishonors both the living and the dead.

Book IV: On the Other Disturbances of the Mind.
Cicero examines anger, lust, envy, and fear as “diseases of the soul.” Philosophy, properly practiced, is medicine; it cures by restoring inner balance and self-command.

Book V: On the Sufficiency of Virtue for Happiness.
The final dialogue crowns the work: virtue alone guarantees happiness, regardless of fortune or fate. The wise person, governed by reason and moral duty, remains free even under tyranny or exile.

In these five meditations, Cicero forged the ethical code that later guided Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—the conviction that liberty begins within the soul.

Former Foes, Now Allies! My New Friend Ihor was on the other of the Cold War

 

Ihor Chernik and I in the Cannon Congressional Office Building

(Good pun, soldiers in the Cannon building....)

Today and tomorrow I am one of 700 delegates from around America advocating for Ukraine in the U.S. Congress.  This is my fifth trip to DC since Russia invaded Ukraine.  I have met many immigrants from Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Today was the first time I met a soldier from the other side of the East-West Cold War border.  

Ihor Chernik grew up in Lviv, Ukraine.  He went to college to study electrical engineering. He joined the Soviet equivalent of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) called Вое́нная ка́федра (Voyenaya kafyedra or Military department). The program required three years of military service. Ihor was commissioned and became a Soviet signal corps officer.  

From a base in Poland, he monitored NATO communications. During peace, his unit was listening for signs of impending war in our radio traffic.  During a war Ihor and his unit would be tracking NATO forces in the battle.  

Several hundred miles away in West Germany, I was training my tank crew to fight a Soviet invasion. Most experts (including Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising) believed would begin in the Fulda Gap in the center of divided Germany. 

World War III never happened. 

Ihor left Lviv in 1994.  He came to America and a job with IBM as a network systems engineer.  He and his wife Larissa lived in Fairfield County, Connecticut, until Ihor retired in 2020.  Now they live in New Hope.  He started skiing at age 6. Retirement allowed Ihor to spend winters in Vermont as a ski instructor. 

In two meetings today, Ihor and I talked Congressional staffers we were on opposite sides in the Cold War but are now united in support of Ukraine.  We will both be working to support Ukraine and will be together in the spring the next time the American Coalition for Ukraine comes to Washington DC.  

When Ihor found out my paternal grandparents emigrated from Odesa (in 1900 and 1901) he said we should go there together.  So far, Lviv is the only city I have visited in Ukraine.  Let's hope our journey will be a celebration of the defeat of the Russian invasion. 

---- 

To be clear: Ihor and I were not deployed to opposite sides of the Cold War battle line at the same time. I was a tank commander in tank Bravo 13 in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 70th Armor from October 1976 to November 1979. Ihor served from 1983 to 1986. From 1982 to 1985 I was a tank commander in tank Bravo 14 in Alpha Company, 6th Battalion, 68th Armor: an Army Reserve unit in Reading, Pennsylvania. If the Soviets had invaded, we had tanks ready in storage in Baumholder, West Germany. Thankfully, war did not break out.

The Tragedy of Vietnam After Roosevelt’s Death

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The death of a single leader can shift the course of nations, topple empires, and condemn millions to suffering. Few examples are as stark as the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945, just weeks before the Allied victory in Europe. Roosevelt’s sudden passing did more than end a presidency. It extinguished a vision for a postwar world in which colonial empires—French, British, Dutch—would not be restored at bayonet point but would instead give way to independence movements already stirring across Asia and Africa.

Nowhere was this failure of vision more tragic than in Indochina. The story of America’s three-decade entanglement in Vietnam, with its toll of millions of Vietnamese dead and more than 58,000 American soldiers killed, has many causes. But the earliest turning point lies at that moment of Roosevelt’s death.

The Collapse of the Old Colonial Order

World War II shattered European empires in Asia. Japan’s lightning victories between 1941 and 1942 humiliated colonial powers that had long claimed superiority. The British garrison in Malaysia and Singapore, thought impregnable, surrendered after only 70 days to a smaller Japanese invasion force. France, already defeated by Germany, saw its Indochinese colony occupied by Japan. The Dutch East Indies fell, and the Philippines endured brutal Japanese occupation.

When the war ended in 1945, the colonial order looked hollow. Nationalists across Asia declared that if Japan could topple Western armies in months, then Europeans were no longer invincible. From Jakarta to Manila, independence movements surged. The Philippines gained independence in 1946, Indonesia after a brief struggle by 1949, and Malaysia within a dozen years through largely peaceful negotiation. Even Singapore, once the crown jewel of Britain’s Asian empire, went its own way less than a decade later.

In this context, the French determination to cling to Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was an anachronism, a refusal to recognize history’s direction.

Roosevelt’s Anti-Colonial Vision

Roosevelt had no illusions about French weakness. He despised the old colonial system and told his aides repeatedly that Indochina must not return to French rule. In March 1945, he declared to General Albert Wedemeyer, “I am going to do everything possible to give the people of that area their independence.” His view was pragmatic as well as moral: colonial rule was unstable, costly, and guaranteed further conflict.

Roosevelt also understood the importance of nationalist leaders like Ho Chi Minh, who had spent decades pressing for Vietnamese independence. Ho was, in 1945, not yet fully aligned with global communism; he was a nationalist first, eager to seek American support. In February and March of that year, Ho reached out to U.S. agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), offering cooperation against Japan and signaling openness to a postwar relationship.

FDR imagined a settlement in which Indochina would be placed under international trusteeship—possibly Chinese, American, or United Nations supervision—until independence could be secured. He believed colonial empires were relics of the past and saw decolonization as part of the Four Freedoms he had championed throughout the war.

Truman’s Reversal

Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. His successor, Harry Truman, did not share Roosevelt’s anti-colonial instincts. Truman’s worldview was shaped less by opposition to European empire than by fear of Soviet expansion. Within months, the Cold War began to dominate American thinking. In that struggle, France was no longer a colonial oppressor but a vital ally whose cooperation was needed in Europe. Supporting France’s reassertion of control in Indochina became, in Washington’s eyes, a lesser evil compared to alienating Paris at the very moment NATO was taking shape.

Thus, when the French returned to Indochina in late 1945 to reclaim their colony, they did so with tacit American blessing. Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence, borrowing words from the American Declaration itself, fell on deaf ears in Washington. The United States, which might have championed Vietnamese independence under Roosevelt, instead bankrolled the French war effort by the early 1950s.

The War That Did Not Have to Be

The tragedy of Vietnam was not inevitable. If Roosevelt had lived, it is plausible he could have cut a deal with Ho Chi Minh and perhaps even with Mao Zedong, who was still consolidating power in China. Roosevelt’s skill in negotiation, his personal authority at the close of World War II, and his moral opposition to colonialism might have shaped a very different trajectory.

Instead, France fought a brutal war of reconquest, climaxing in its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords called for national elections to unify Vietnam. But Cold War logic again intervened: Eisenhower admitted privately that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the vote. Instead of elections, the United States backed the artificial creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem.

This decision locked America into a decades-long conflict, first by proxy and then directly with U.S. combat troops. Millions of Vietnamese perished, along with tens of thousands of Americans, all in a war fought to preserve a colonial arrangement Roosevelt had already declared obsolete in 1945.

China and the Wider Consequences

Roosevelt’s death also shaped China’s fate. Roosevelt had distrusted Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt regime and was open to pragmatic relations with Mao. Truman, however, quickly defined Mao’s movement as Soviet-aligned, missing opportunities for negotiation. The result was a hardened Cold War divide in East Asia, with the United States locked into supporting weak regimes in both China (until Chiang’s flight to Taiwan) and South Vietnam.

The consequences were immense: civil war in China, Communist victory in 1949, the Korean War beginning in 1950, and the Vietnam War escalating through the 1960s. Each conflict can be traced back to choices made in the immediate aftermath of Roosevelt’s death.

The Cascade of Death

The cascade of history that followed Roosevelt’s passing illustrates the fragility of turning points. One man’s vision might have offered independence without decades of bloodshed. Instead, Truman’s acquiescence to French ambitions, his fixation on Europe, and his early Cold War framing condemned Vietnam to thirty years of war.

By the time the last U.S. helicopters lifted off from Saigon in 1975, the toll was staggering: more than three million Vietnamese dead, Cambodia and Laos devastated, American society bitterly divided, and trust in government shattered. What might have been a peaceful decolonization like Malaysia or Indonesia had become a tragedy of global proportions.

History does not turn on inevitabilities but on choices. Franklin Roosevelt, even in his final months, made clear he intended to strip France of its empire in Indochina and support independence. His death removed that possibility. Truman’s different priorities, born of Cold War anxieties, restored empire where history had already passed its verdict.

The result was not only the Vietnam War (Called the American War in Vietnam) but also a chain reaction that reshaped China, Korea, and America itself. The lesson is stark: leadership matters. The death of one leader can alter the lives of millions and change the destiny of nations. In Southeast Asia, it meant tragedy instead of freedom, war instead of independence.