Blake Smith, a contributing writer at Tablet, lives in Chicago.
Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature
The rediscovery of Susan Taubes risks trapping her work within the prison of contemporary autofiction
A critique of the COVID regime exposes the limits of conservative political theory
The pioneering gay writer and editor Michael Denneny, who died on April 12, learned from his teacher Arendt that an individual can be free only as part of a free community
How Andrea Long Chu became a latter-day Saul of Tarsus in her journey from guilty white man to taboo-breaking Asian woman
An exchange of letters
Can old, dead, gay, white French males save us from the West’s latest moral crusade?
Should aristocrats of the spirit have sex with each other or seize power in a military coup?
The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it.
Rescuing the pioneering literary and social critic from the clutches of boring right-wingers and ‘Jews of culture’ on the 100th anniversary of his birth
Judith Shklar’s minority liberalism offers both an escape hatch from the Hobbesian tyranny of democratic majorities and a pathway to becoming the freest and most authentic versions of ourselves
An appreciation of Laura Riding, the great Jewish modernist poet who abandoned her genius to grow oranges in Florida
The abortion debate has been irreversibly altered by the partisan biopolitics of COVID
The controversial Jewish thinker leads us to see ourselves as we are
Today’s refugees face a new pressure to narrativize and commodify their experience
The poet, who died last month, understood that American tradition is broken—but knew it was possible to begin again
Without an elite capable of making good decisions, rights and laws aren’t worth the paper they are printed on
Jacob Taubes’ deeply penetrating and profoundly mischievous thoughts on the evasions of liberalism and the irreconcilable nature of Messianic expectation strike a chord in the present moment