Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

In this issue of Liberties: Katherine C. Epstein -- Scholarship and the Future of Society; Mario Vargas Llosa -- A Forgotten Giant; Cass R. Sunstein -- A Constitutional Manifesto; Mark Edmundson -- The Trouble with Good People; James Wolcott -- Billionaires on Parada; Elliot Ackerman -- The American Strategic Imagination; Moshe Halbertal -- Two Concepts of God in Judaism and Beyond; Noga Arikha -- Why Brain Science does not Have the Last Word; Carlos Fraenkel -- Astronomy and Magic; Daphne Merkin -- What You Never Knew About Sigmund Freud's Wife; James R. Russell -- The Poet Misak Medzarents, and Two Poems; Robert Alter -- What Flaubert Taught Agnon; Rachel Connolly -- The Unfunny Fate of Humor in Our Time; Helen Vendler -- The Excitement of Discovering a New Poet; Celeste Marcus -- Israel and The Struggle for Liberal Nationalism; Leon Wieseltier -- How To Think Unhysterically About Change; and, poetry by Leslie Williams and Misak Medzarents.

Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and introduces the next generation of writers and poets to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today's culture and politics. Nobel Prize winners, leading op-ed writers, well-known non-fiction writers, rising talents, and poets from around the world. A new issue is published every quarter.

There's a reason why engaged citizens, cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and activists from across the cultural and political spectrum read and cherish Liberties.

Katherine C. Epstein is a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. This essay was translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and is the author, among other books, of This is Not Normal.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Unwelcome Guest: The Super-Ego in the Age of the Internet.

James Wolcott is the author of Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs.

Elliot Ackerman is the author most recently of Halcyon.

Moshe Halbertal is the author, among other books, of The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature. This essay was translated by Daniel Tabak.

Noga Arikha teaches philosophy and the history of ideas in Florence. Her book The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind appeared last year.

Carlos Fraenkel is the James McGill Professor of Philosophy and Religion at McGill University.

Daphne Merkin is an American critic and novelist.

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Emeritus, Harvard University.

Robert Alter is professor emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at University of California at Berkeley, and the author of a forthcoming biographical study of Amos Oz.

Rachel Connolly is the author of Lazy City

Helen Vendler now writes from Laguna Niguel, California, where she is inventing a new life near her son and his family in Laguna Beach.

Leslie Williams is the author of Even the Dark.