“Report from Donbas.”
‘I am simply bearing witness.’ When I first read Guy Mettan’s report from Donbas I felt as if he had transported me to an antipodean universe of some kind. You can take this, as I do, as a measure of…
Patrick Lawrence: University—An Attack on Intelligence
“Not in my lifetime,” I used to think when contemplating America’s decline and fall—a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but…
Patrick Lawrence: Of Journalists, Students and Power
The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to their wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the…
Patrick Lawrence: This Isn’t Fascism
Political confusion and deluded notions of fascism colored Max Azzarello’s tragic death by self-immolation. On April 19, just as a court in Lower Manhattan finished selecting a jury to hear the farcical “hush money” case against Donald Trump, a 37-year-old…
Patrick Lawrence: Becoming Who We Are
The following is an edited, amended, and condensed version of a speech I delivered in Zurich’s environs earlier this month. The occasion was sponsored by Zeit–Fragen, a twice-monthly journal that also comes out in French and English as Horizons et débats and Current Concerns….
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Could the Russians Seize Congress?
The Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. While these conjured imaginings may be laughable, the consequences of a culture of Cold War fear are far from funny. The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put. As…
Patrick Lawrence: ‘Automated Murder’: Israel’s ‘AI’ in Gaza
“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Europe’s Identity Crisis
As European leaders continue to import a version of U.S. militarism, rearmament will cost the Continent its postwar social contract. It is many years now since the French, bless them, revolted as Disneyland Paris arose near the previously uninvaded village…
Patrick Lawrence: Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall
I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Ðiên Biên Phú at 70
How did the Vietnamese prevail at that world-historical moment? The answers shed light on the world we see outside our windows now. I had the most salutary email the other day, a reviving lift amid these, humanity’s darkest days, surely, in…