It’s Orson Welles’ birthday Seen here in Rome, 1974

Dismantling USAID, defunding VOA, closing the Wilson Center, and hollowing out the State Department's career diplomatic service together represent a strategic effort to decapitate the organizational and intellectual infrastructure of the liberal international order within the American state itself

"We are witnessing the advent of a new multipolar world order that will be defined by a pyramidal structure." At its top are two superpowers (U.S./China) with three great powers beneath them (India, Russia, the EU), with middle powers occupying the base. www.theideasletter.org/essay/power-...

In his address upon being awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize at the University of Tübingen in 1983, Léopold Sédar Senghor quoted Friedrich Hölderlin's simile: "Like springtime, genius emigrates from country to country."

Wassily Kandinsky (1923)

In 1995 Martin Scorsese & Francis Ford Coppola collaborated on restoring Mikhail Kalatozov's masterpiece "I Am Cuba," a 1964 film whose technical advisors included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Stopped in Chicago on my way out west and back east on a Greyhound Ameripass trip in 1975 #2.

David Rieff: “Philip Roth told me that I come from an intellectual somewhere, but a geographic and ethnic nowhere... But I do come from an ethnic somewhere, and that’s lesbian America. I grew up surrounded largely by gay people in my childhood in New York.” www.theideasletter.org/essay/woke-o...

RIP Frederick Wiseman and thank you for your films. Great filmmaker and a giant of an example of what it means to maintain full control over your creative work. Bought these from his distribution company Zipporah Films that he created to distribute his own documentaries. Love and respect.

Fascinating, great interview! @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-pure...

“Shame isn’t a pleasant emotion, but any honest reckoning with what my country has become has to start with it.”

For @open-society.bsky.social's Ideas Letter, I've written a profile of David Rieff, the son of Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff and a globetrotting humanitarian intellectual who in recent years has taken a striking anti-woke and anti-trans turn.

Pool Parlor by Jacob Lawrence (1942)

Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

Barrington Moore taught that the intellectual's commitment to truth, as best they can reckon it, carries with it the obligation to point out the illusions, ambiguities, and hypocrisies "of those who raise the banner of freedom in order to perpetuate brutality."

A titan, R.I.P. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/a...

We must not succumb to the ideological illusion that, since subjects are declared fair and equal under the law, and since the law assumes freedom and equality, magistrates and jurists are the servants of freedom and equality, not of capitalist relations. -- Louis Althusser

My new essay on the New Right and its relationship to historical fascism has been published at the Ideas Letter @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-ge...

Some think of tradition as a static set of values that end up tilting the scales in favor of their cultural preferences. The late Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) rightly defined tradition as "an argument extended through time, socially embodying continuities of conflict.."

God they were great, this is such an underrated record

From cancel culture to Maga’s assault on campuses, defending my enemy has become decimating my enemy. @lbenardo.bsky.social asks: can our ideals of free speech survive, and should we want them to?

I am astonished again and again when I find out how little it has penetrated into people's consciousness that the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience, is a right higher than positive law and as old as civilization itself. -- Herbert Marcuse

The choice of photo is absolutely brilliant, Russell and Vanessa Redgrave. Thanks @lbenardo.bsky.social

I wrote something about analytic Philospphy, and Christoph Schuringa’s book for the Ideas Letter @stefanschubert.bsky.social @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/bloodl...

From cancel culture to Maga’s assault on campuses, defending my enemy has become decimating my enemy. @lbenardo.bsky.social asks: can our ideals of free speech survive, and should we want them to?

I published two pieces on women in China this week! First, a review essay @chinabooksreview.com on two Fang Fang novels, Soft Burial & The Running Flame (tr. Michael Berry). Gendered oppression has persisted during the socialist period and capitalist reforms, despite the CCP's promise of liberation.

The absolutist position on free speech—I might hate your words, but I shall defend to the death your right to say them—may not be right for an age of raw and extreme polarisation, writes @lbenardo.bsky.social.

Insisting on absolute free speech is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times, writes @lbenardo.bsky.social. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/fre...

Compared, say, to most African, Asian, Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space where we can actually talk, rather than being part of the political system with academic appointments being outright political ones. -- Edward Said (2000)

Three Chicago character types

At @open-society.bsky.social, our fellows play a crucial role in reinforcing restless critical thought. Today, I congratulate the 31 public intellectuals who will join us as 2025 Fellows.

In 1967, philosopher of language Michael Dummett and his wife, the author Ann Dummett, were arrested for picketing against racial discrimination, charged with public disorder, but acquitted upon an official admission that the police, not protesters, had obstructed passage.

Recognition of the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience, belongs to the oldest and most sanctified elements of Western civilization. -- Herbert Marcuse

The greatest pop-rock/singer-songwriter record you may not know is Kevin Ayres’ 1973 masterpiece Bananamour

Grove Press retained Norman Mailer's cousin Charles Rembar to challenge the Post Office's seizure of Lady Chatterley in 1959, the 2nd Circuit agreeing that, especially given Archibald MacLeish's endorsement, the work met J Brennan's slightest redeeming social importance standard.

This volume (1937) was a political science staple for three decades - Plato to fascism - George Sabine professor of philosophy @Cornell, also a carpenter and blacksmith, assisted Herbert Marcuse with his 1941 work Reason and Revolution.

Herbert Marcuse suggested that the way to evaluate acts of rebellion, transgressive speech, etc., would be to ask whether these have a "transparent educational function" under the circumstances, eg by revealing "hidden cruelties" or the class character of the interrupted proceeding.

Happy Birthday to the great John Brown, born 225 years ago today

Do you guys think Villanova is going to start saying things like “Pope Leo XIV (class of 77)”?

The new composition of the Supreme Court institutionalizes the progress of reaction. -- Herbert Marcuse (1972)

Moebius, poster art for Les Chiens, 1978

Dylan Riley @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social argues that "We are living through an inverted revolution. The political heirs of Lenin and Gramsci are leading a right-wing transformation from the White House rather than a left-wing one from the streets." Read here www.theideasletter.org/essay/reflec...

Two new essays on President Trump's first 100 days "endeavor to develop a new framework and a new conceptual vocabulary to apprehend our dismal moment." One is titled "A Modern Counterrevolution," the other "Reflections on an Inverted Revolution." Read here: www.theideasletter.org/issue/the-we...

Plus: an intense interview by the brilliant Leonard Benardo @lbenardo.bsky.social turning the tables, as it were, on the legal historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins @wesleyanuniversity.bsky.social : www.theideasletter.org/essay/intell...

Until Trump, none of Bukele’s would-be imitators had managed to get far. Trump understood is that the key isn’t the actual policies, but rather the sustained, brazen assault on the rule of law, which in itself appears to be “doing something” about the problems. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Not all progress is good.

ICE under Tom Homan is engaged in systematic criminally reckless treatment of human beings.

One of HLA Hart's principal influences was Norberto Bobbio, who's 1950 breakout work saw law as a discourse of normative sentences issued by law-giving authorities, hence legal rules as linguistic entities. Bobbio overall doesn't appear to be widely translated into English.