Gamma Senmin, Soga Shōhaku (1730-1783). Freer Collection, Washington.
PATRICKLAWRENCE.US serves several purposes. As an archive of the columns, commentary, and essays, it makes this work available in one place for the first time. The site also introduces my books and provides readers or those with professional queries several ways to connect. You can help sustain the work via Patreon. This is also home to an occasional journal, Cú Chulainn.
“These are my footsteps.”
——Sam Francis
Featured.
Beyond a Failed Narrative - December 17, 2022 - Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially “chosen people” suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost...Recent work.
Patrick Lawrence: Waves Upon the Sea of Silence - May 17, 2025 - A couple of weeks after Israel began its campaign of terror in Gaza two Octobers ago, a journalist and novelist named Omar El Akkad published a note on X, formerly known as Twitter, that has stayed with me ever since: One day,...
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Diplomatic Chess, Ukraine the Pawn - May 16, 2025 - In Istanbul, a door was pried open after a soap opera’s worth of chicanery in London, Paris, Berlin and Kiev. Now the question is what Trump can do to address Russia’s concerns. As was universally expected, little came out of Istanbul...
“Demolitions.” - May 6, 2025 - Destruction and self-destruction. In the following update, Qadir al–Thaer—whose previous reporting appears here and here—reports on the recent demolition of a large residential building in the Palestinian community of Beit Ummar. The town of 18,000 inhabitants is located eleven kilometers north of the...Cú Chulainn.
Cú Chulainn stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
——Yeats, Cú Chulainn’s Fight with the Sea,
1892
