Pens and Poison

Pens and Poison

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Want to Understand Literature? Start with Classical Music.
On the Deep Kinship Between Classical Music and the Written Word
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Liza Libes
31
Ambitious Women Aren’t the Problem
What Victorian literature and modern social science reveal about why smart men marry smart women—and why Matt Walsh doesn’t get it.
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Liza Libes
57
Top 10 Poets of All Time
Your Guide to Getting Started with Poetry
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Liza Libes
39
Haunted by the Past: Tarkovsky, Dostoyevsky, and Demons
Memory, Guilt, and Generational Cycles in Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Dostoyevsky’s Demons
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Liza Libes
1
Why Can’t Our Kids Write?
The Silent Crisis in Education No One Wants to Talk About
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Liza Libes
17

March 2025

Columbia University Never Cared About Free Speech… Until It Became Convenient.
Ideological Hypocrisy Turned a Campus Known for Censorship into a Sanctuary for Selective Dissent
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Liza Libes
34
Daddy, I Have Had to Love You: Desire in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”
Read the Thesis That Got Me Kicked Out of Columbia University's Honors English Program
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Liza Libes
10
Rebel Poets: The Importance of Writing in a Free Society
Plato believed in censoring passion. Do we see the same unfolding today?
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Liza Libes
7
Stefan Zweig, Judaism, and the Death of Europe
How One of the 20th Century’s Greatest Writers Mourned the Cultural Suicide of His Spiritual Homeland
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Liza Libes
39
Think Twice Before Attacking the Department of Education
Why Cutting Federal Education Funding Won’t Fix Academia—And Might Make It Worse
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Liza Libes
50
In Defense of the Tense
Matt Sutherland Defends the Present Tense in Fiction Writing
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Matthew Sutherland
9
Why Conservatives Must Defend the Liberal Arts
The Case for Tradition, Intellectual Inquiry, and the Power of Reading
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Liza Libes
21
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