A Day at the Imperial War Museum Duxford

 

One of the highlights of my recent visit to England was a bicycle ride from Cambridge to the Imperial War Museum Duxford, one of the finest aviation museums I have ever visited. Housed on the historic airfield from which RAF fighter squadrons flew during the Battle of Britain, Duxford is much more than a museum. It is a living airfield where history still flies.

My visit began with an unexpected thrill. A beautifully restored Bristol Blenheim taxied past, its twin Bristol Mercury radial engines producing a sound that transported me back to newsreels of the early years of World War II. Soon afterward, a Supermarine Spitfire taxied onto the runway, accelerated, and lifted gracefully into the sky. Seeing a Spitfire fly from an active wartime airfield was one of those rare experiences that no photograph or film can truly capture. It was easy to imagine the young RAF pilots who once took off from the same runway to defend Britain.

I spent the remainder of the day exploring Duxford's five major exhibition halls, each offering a different chapter in aviation history. Together they present an extraordinary survey of British aviation, from the fragile aircraft of the First World War through the Battle of Britain, the jet age, and the Cold War.

As impressive as the British collection is, I was equally surprised by the museum's remarkable display of American aircraft. Few museums outside the United States possess such a comprehensive collection. The American Air Museum houses iconic aircraft spanning nearly the entire twentieth century, including fighters, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cargo planes, helicopters, and Cold War strategic aircraft. Walking beneath these machines provides a vivid reminder of the enormous industrial and technological effort that shaped the outcome of World War II and the decades that followed.

Unlike many museums where aircraft are displayed as isolated exhibits, Duxford presents them within the broader story of military aviation. The exhibits explain not only how airplanes evolved but also how they transformed warfare, strategy, and the lives of the men and women who flew and maintained them. Restoration workshops visible to visitors further emphasize that preserving aviation history is an ongoing craft rather than simply displaying artifacts behind ropes.

Perhaps what impressed me most was the atmosphere of the place. Because Duxford remains an operating airfield, the museum never feels static. The sound of aircraft engines, the sight of airplanes moving across the taxiways, and the possibility that a historic aircraft might suddenly take flight create an experience unlike any conventional museum.

For anyone interested in military history, engineering, or aviation, the Imperial War Museum Duxford is an extraordinary destination. It combines the history of the Royal Air Force, the remarkable contribution of American air power, and the excitement of seeing historic aircraft still alive and flying. For me, the ride from Cambridge and the day spent at Duxford became one of the most memorable experiences of my visit to England.

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.

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.

Review: Organic Nomenclature and the Discipline of Naming

 

There are few books more practical—or more quietly transformative—than Organic Nomenclature by James G. Traynham. It is not a glamorous book. It does not promise sweeping insights or theoretical breakthroughs. Instead, it offers something more fundamental: a disciplined way to bring order to the sprawling, often bewildering world of organic chemistry.

I first encountered Traynham’s book in 1994, under circumstances far removed from a university classroom. I was working as a writer at an advertising agency when we took on a new client: Atofina, a French chemical company expanding its American operations. Their U.S. headquarters was in Philadelphia, and I began commuting from Lancaster several times a week. On those train rides, I opened an organic chemistry textbook and worked steadily through Traynham’s exercises.

That decision changed the way I approached my work. Organic nomenclature is, at its core, a language. Without it, the world of organic chemistry remains opaque—filled with unfamiliar names that conceal more than they reveal. With it, structure begins to emerge. Chains, branches, functional groups, and substituents all fall into place. What once looked like chaos becomes readable.

Traynham’s book excels because it treats nomenclature as a skill to be practiced, not merely understood. The exercises are incremental and cumulative, forcing the reader to engage actively with the material. There is no shortcut. Mastery comes only through repetition—naming compounds, checking answers, and learning from mistakes. Over time, patterns begin to stick. The logic of the system becomes internal rather than memorized.

For me, this practical mastery had immediate value. It allowed me to speak more confidently with chemists and researchers, to understand the products and processes I was writing about, and to translate technical information for colleagues and customers who did not share that background. The book did not make me a chemist, but it gave me access to the language of chemistry—and that made all the difference.

Recently, I returned to Traynham’s exercises, working through them again decades later. The experience was both humbling and satisfying. Some concepts came back quickly; others required renewed effort. But by the end, I felt once again that sense of order—the ability to look at a compound and name it with confidence. Even the modern world seemed to respond: my online feeds began offering organic chemistry quizzes and resources, as if the discipline had reawakened a dormant part of my thinking.

Organic Nomenclature remains what it always was: a workbook. It rewards patience, persistence, and attention to detail. For anyone who wants to make sense of organic chemistry—whether as a student, professional, or curious outsider—it offers something rare: clarity earned through practice.

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.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: A Great and Complex Founder of America

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is one of those rare biographies that does two things at once: it resurrects a historical figure in full human complexity, and it makes a persuasive case that this figure mattered more than most readers were ever taught. Hamilton emerges not merely as a Founding Father, but as the engine of the early American republic—brilliant, abrasive, indispensable, and ultimately self-destructive.

Chernow begins with Hamilton’s astonishing rise from obscurity. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, orphaned young, and educated through sheer force of talent, Hamilton arrives in North America already sharpened by hardship. Chernow is unsparing here—Hamilton’s hunger for order, status, and permanence is rooted in chaos. This psychological grounding matters, because it explains everything that follows. Hamilton’s obsession with structure, credit, and authority was not abstract theory; it was survival instinct elevated into national policy.

Hamilton’s Revolutionary War service is one of the book’s great strengths. As aide-de-camp to George Washington, Hamilton becomes indispensable—drafting correspondence, managing logistics, and acting as Washington’s intellectual lieutenant. Chernow makes clear that Washington recognized Hamilton’s genius early and trusted him deeply, even when he found him exasperating. The relationship is portrayed as mutually formative: Washington gave Hamilton legitimacy and restraint; Hamilton gave Washington a mind capable of thinking several steps ahead. Without Hamilton, Washington’s presidency would have been weaker. Without Washington, Hamilton would likely have burned himself out even faster.

The heart of the book—and the reason it has had such a long cultural afterlife—is Chernow’s treatment of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. Here, Hamilton is not just a theorist but a relentless operator. His financial program—assumption of state debts, establishment of public credit, the Bank of the United States—was radical, controversial, and foundational. Chernow argues convincingly that Hamilton understood something his rivals did not: nations survive on confidence, not purity. Jefferson wanted a virtuous agrarian republic; Hamilton wanted a functioning one. History has largely sided with Hamilton, and Chernow does not pretend otherwise.

But this is not hagiography. Chernow is clear-eyed about Hamilton’s flaws, especially his inability to stop fighting. The political infighting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is presented as both ideological and personal. Hamilton’s pen was lethal, and he used it constantly. He could not resist humiliating opponents or escalating conflicts, even when discretion would have served him better. His feud with John Adams is particularly telling: Hamilton undermined a president from his own party out of intellectual contempt and strategic impatience, a move that all but guaranteed his political isolation.

The most devastating section of the book is Hamilton’s self-immolation in the Reynolds affair. Chernow treats this episode not as a scandal for its own sake but as a study in catastrophic judgment. Hamilton, obsessed with his reputation for probity, chose public confession over political survival. The result was moral clarity paired with total ruin. It is one of the strangest episodes in American political history, and Chernow narrates it with restraint and disbelief in equal measure.

The book’s final act—the rivalry with Aaron Burr and the fatal duel—is tragic precisely because it feels avoidable. Chernow resists easy moralizing. Burr is not a cartoon villain, and Hamilton is not a martyr. Instead, Chernow shows two men trapped by honor culture, pride, and accumulated grievance. Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot, so to speak, reads less like noble sacrifice and more like exhaustion. He had been fighting all his life; the fight finally killed him.

What makes Chernow’s biography exceptional is its balance. Hamilton is neither sanitized nor dismissed. He is brilliant and reckless, visionary and intolerable. Chernow’s prose is clear, propulsive, and confident without being flashy. At nearly 800 pages, the book earns its length; there is very little padding. Every feud, memo, and policy debate builds toward a coherent portrait of a man who helped create the United States and then made himself impossible within it.

If there is a final judgment here, it is this: Hamilton was the Founder most attuned to modernity, and therefore the least comfortable in his own time. Chernow makes that case decisively. You finish the book convinced not only that Hamilton mattered, but that the country still runs—financially, bureaucratically, institutionally—on tracks he laid down. Loving this book is not surprising. It is serious history written with narrative force, and it leaves you thinking hard about power, ambition, and the costs of being right too soon.

In this year the nation Hamilton helped to found celebrates 250 years since The Declaration of Independence was published on July 4, 1776. I recently re-read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt in which she describes why most revolutions aspire to freedom and end in tyranny. Central to the book is her explanation of why the American Revolution succeeded when nearly all others failed. 

Will America continue into a more perfect union or after a quarter-millennium fall into the tyranny that is the fate of every other revolution?  This year 2026 will say a lot about America.

  

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.