Essays by

James Duesterberg

The Cloud of Unknowing

This is the fifth and final column in a series on political life in 2020.

Infinite Jest

This is the fourth in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read more here. The good thing about movies is that […]

After Cops

This is the third in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read more here. On Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day, George Floyd, […]

In Bloom

This is the second in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read the first here. After weeks of rain and unseasonable […]

Killing Time

This is the first in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg. Being neither alive nor dead, nor even simply inert, a virus […]

Bad Infinity

“In the United States at this time,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1949, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” These words are strange to read today. One cannot imagine someone writing them now and, in retrospect, they suggest a dangerous hubris. And yet it is not clear that, applied either to Trilling’s time or to ours, they are wrong.

Final Fantasy

Like every virtual world, there is something seductive about the online realm of the new reactionary politics. Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored.