Europe
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Europe Has a Free Speech Problem February 19, 2025
Last week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked an A-list group of European political and military leaders at the Munich Security Conference in Germany with a blunt message: Europe has gone too far in restricting speech. According to Vance, the mai...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
The Battle For Better Air February 03, 2025
Imagine: it is 900 AD. You are in a great hall somewhere in northern Europe. In the center of the room is a vast open wood or peat fire where meat is roasting and a stew is bubbling in a large pot. The hall is warm — okay, it’s tepid — and the atmosp...
Europe’s Music Meritocracy November 04, 2024
A visit earlier this year to two Baroque masterpieces of the Hapsburg Empire—Prague and Vienna—revealed a classical music ecosystem not usually glimpsed from the United States. From the perspective of New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, classical mus...
Europe is Healthier than US July 01, 2024
The above picture, from a cafe where I rested after a sixteen-mile walk, isn’t anything special. Neither is the town it’s in, Tournon-sur-Rhône, which is my least favorite of the string of mid-sized and smaller towns I stayed in along the Rhône Valle...
The Night Taylor Swift Conquered Europe May 13, 2024
I’m just off the train at Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, and walking down a pedestrianised avenue to Paris La Defense Arena, a hulking, 40,000-capacity quadrilateral that’s the largest indoor arena in Europe. “Welcome to New York”, sings one of th...
America and Europe Are Equally Poor April 29, 2024
“Honey, don’t worry,” I said, reassuring myself as much as her. “I see a big crowd up ahead. It’ll be fine.” We were wandering down Market Street in San Francisco, after sundown. Despite the towering buildings looming over us, designed to host tens o...
What’s the Story? April 24, 2024
The Scottish astrologer James Bassantin, born during the reign of James IV, was what we would now term a hustler. He believed himself of a learnedness and sophistication befitting the highest intellectual circles of Renaissance Europe and would do an...
The New Defenders of the Faith April 09, 2024
This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale...
Spinoza in Full April 01, 2024
The life of Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza is something of a paradox. On one hand, it is difficult to imagine a more retiring, pedestrian existence. A confirmed bachelor, Spinoza spent his relatively short life mostly secluded in his modest apartment i...
Radical Moderates February 29, 2024
The political experiments, disasters, and successes—as well as the theories—produced in Europe between 1789 and 1848 remain extraordinarily relevant. The terms in which we criticize the E.U.’s bureaucratic politics or describe the populist politics o...
