A Judge's Verdict on Israel

Countries exist, and whether they're the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus or China, no one doubts their basic right to continue their existence—unless it is Israel. Roy Altman, a young federal judge in Miami, has been lecturing about Israel widely on campuses since October 7. Israel on Trial distills his rebuttals of the six claims he has most often encountered that aim to undermine and delegitimize the presently constituted Jewish state.

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Bloomswary

If your ideal critic is someone who is learned, widely read, with the ability to concoct new ideas, and possessed of a powerful memory, Harold Bloom may well be your man. Bloom has written about more writers than perhaps any critic in the modern era. He came up with the idea of anxiety caused by literary influence and put forth the notion that a woman wrote the Bible. He is said to have memorized Wordsworth’s poem "The Prelude," a mere 736 pages in its Penguin edition. Had I lived in New Haven, where Harold Bloom taught at Yale, I should have called him in to recite "The Prelude" as a sure-fire way to end dull parties.

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Orwell Unfiltered

All Souls, the blue riband Oxford graduate college, used to be famous for its fellowship exams. A particular highlight was the General Paper, in which candidates were often presented with a solitary abstract noun ("Hope," "Charity," etc.) or an especially thorny epigram ("Freedom and equality are ultimately incompatible") and invited to "discuss." Well, an All Souls General Paper here in 2026 could usefully begin with the question, "What is meant by the adjective ‘Orwellian’?"

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Daddy Issues

In her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives, Darby Saxbe argues that there is a lot of variation in our own country, around the world, and through history in terms of how much men participate in the daily activities of parenthood. Saxbe is a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California, where she runs the NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties lab.

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Dr Jill Biden Writes What She Knows

In her new memoir, Dr. Jill Biden, Ed. D., fondly recounts the moment she had "never felt prouder to be an educator." You might assume it happened in a classroom. But that's not how the good doctor rolls.

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A Tale of Two City-States

I remember years ago reading (or was I just thinking?) that the age of Thucydides was over. His Peloponnesian War, the history of the devastating strife between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C., was a text for the times during the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. No less a figure than Secretary of State George C. Marshall, at no other time than in 1947, at the start of the Cold War, said that to understand the international issues of the day it was necessary to study the Peloponnesian War. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, and with the replacement of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry with a world of ethnic, national, and religious blocs, it seemed that we had entered the era of another Greek writer, Herodotus, whose Histories describes a mosaic of international relations; maybe even more so in the era of the Global War on Terror. But now, great power rivalry is back, as the United States and its allies face formidable opposition led by China. We turn once again for wisdom and perspective, therefore, to the history of the competition between Athens and Sparta. To quote Godfather III, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Enter Adrian Goldsworthy, author of a new book on the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. The reader is in the best of hands. Goldsworthy combines the expertise of the scholar that he is with the common touch of the author that he has become. He is one of the very best historians of the ancient world writing for a popular audience.

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How a Strongman Stays in Power

For decades, most Americans of an intellectual bent visiting or staying in Turkey would be regaled by the same set of opinions. Turks who spoke English were educated in the predictable way; their views often represented the anti-American, antimilitary, anticapitalist slice of the generally secular middle classes—views not uncommon in Europe and elsewhere during the Cold War. Then came Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as Istanbul mayor in the 1990s, and as prime minister in the 2000s, a distinctly more conservative figure. Yet, a lot of the enlightened folk saw in him a champion of democracy and a liberation from the cycle of military coups. Free marketeers liked him for deregulating commerce. The pious millions moving to cities from the country saw him as one of them, his parents having migrated from the Black Sea area. All in all, the liberal-minded majority approved of him. Sadly, he was one of the first populist authoritarians in embryo.

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When America Declared Itself

The celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary is now very nearly upon us, as the signal date of July 4th approaches. Of course, to be technical about it, and as many Americans are well aware, July 2, 1776 was the actual day that the Continental Congress approved the resolution proposed on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, the act that would make the rebellious British North American colonies into "free and independent States." Writing to his wife Abigail on the 3rd of July, John Adams got carried away with enthusiasm, declaring that the 2nd of July would be "the most memorable Epoca, in the History of America," the "Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty"; it would be "solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

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Harvard’s Slide into Stupidity

I have never met Harvey Mansfield, the distinguished scholar and Harvard University Professor of Government, Emeritus, but he strikes me as the kind of professor I had in my first graduate course at Georgia State University, then a commuter college in downtown Atlanta, in 1992. That professor taught Early American Literature with the appreciation, insight, and knowledge of a traditional scholar.

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Royally Screwed

At a time when most royal biographers (myself, alas, included) tend to major in snark and intrigue when it comes to Britain’s most beleaguered family, it is that major-domo of probity Hugo Vickers who is on hand to restore integrity and balance to historical and social dissection of the Firm. He assures us early in this biography of Wallis Simpson—published in the United States to tie-in with the new film The Duchess and I, in which none other than Joan Collins plays the ailing Duchess of Windsor and for which, inevitably, Vickers has done duty as historical consultant—that "I had been acutely aware of Queen Elizabeth II from an early age." This might not seem an especially impressive boast—so had most people—but Vickers, who was a pupil at the royals’ neighboring school of Eton, was able to witness both the Queen and her disgraced uncle, the Duke of Windsor, up close, thanks to his access to Eton’s St. George’s Chapel.

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