Author: James Livingston

We all know that Trump’s idiocy has meaning–the too-long tie, the compressed facial expressions that amount to an imitation of a bullfrog, call it a frown, even the casual gestures as he approaches or departs the press corps. But does he mean it?  Well, yeah, the tie is “slimming,” he says. But me, the secret psychoanalyst, I keep asking, what’s with the triangle he always lowers to his crotch when the photo op occurs, from family portrait to state occasion, like yesterday with the wife of the pretender to the Venezuelan throne?  Thumb to thumb, always, and what, always...

At Facebook, Brian Connolly, a former Rutgers student, wonders if the music he’s listening to has an effect on the shape and sound of the sentences he’s writing.  Of course, I say.  How could it not? I used to say that the difference between fiction and non-fiction is pretty simple: fiction persuades without argument, by articulating a world that is substantial and believable—that is, inhabitable—and yet not quite real.  I don’t say that anymore because I’ve come to think that non-fiction also persuades without argument, mainly by imposing narrative forms on what was a random, or at least meaningless,...

David Brooks keeps pulling wabbits out of his hat—he keeps invoking writers, artists, and theorists who seem, at first glance, to stand athwart his conservative political agenda. But, having now combed through the entire Brooks archive, I can see that his that agenda boils down to a form of “personalism” (on which he wrote a previous column). This was the interwar creed conceived by its founders and followers as a “third way” between capitalism and communism, as a path toward social democracy.  Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, and Reinhold Niebuhr were among the figures associated with this “third...