On April 9, 2021, the Chinese Cyberspace Administration’s Central Network Information Office Reporting Center for Illegal and Undesirable Information promulgated a circular letter concerning the pervasive and unwelcome presence of “harmful information involving historical nihilism” on the internet. Citing the…
Some four hundred thousand visitors pass through the wrought iron gates of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague each year, most of them, we may safely presume, with the intention of viewing the institution’s most prized possession: Johannes Vermeer’s Meisje…
Испепеляющие годы! Безумья ль в вас, надежды ль весть? От дней войны, от дней свободы — Кровавый отсвет в лицах есть. These years of conflagration, Is there madness in you, or is there hope? These days of war, these days…
The Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre, writing to his Russian counterpart Prince Pyotr Borisovich Kozlovsky in the autumn of 1815, could not help but express his profound displeasure with the amoral nature of the czarist bureaucracy. “Some strange spirit of…
“Manuscripts don’t burn,” or so the devil Woland tells us in Mikhail Bulgakov’s darkly comedic novel The Master and Margarita. In Bulgakov’s magical realist literary universe, the devil might very well pluck a manuscript unharmed from a blazing stove, but…
The head of the executed man thought, saw, suffered. And I saw what he saw, understood what he thought, and felt what he suffered. How long did it last? Three minutes, they told me. The executed man must have thought:…
There exists a vast taxonomy of political gaffes, including everything from verbal and Freudian slips to hot-mic fiascos and literal pratfalls, but few of these are of any lasting consequence. It might be mildly embarrassing for an American president to,…
It happened on the twenty-ninth day of the month of Sivan, in the year 5701, and it happened in the Slobodka neighborhood of the Lithuanian city of Kovne. To put it another way, it happened on the twenty-fourth of June,…
I “The wicked are estranged from the womb,” so the Psalms tell us, “they go astray from birth.” King David’s aetiology of crime was perhaps the first, and remains the most concise, prefiguring later theories of biological positivism. If criminality…
I Even after a lapse of more than 20 years, I can still see it in my mind’s eye: a Tang-era molded earthenware horse figurine, its head turned resolutely to the left, its back legs ever so slightly bent in…