James Wolcott Author

Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties.

Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties.

Oksana Forostyna is a Ukrainian writer and translator.

Robert Kagan is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author most recently of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. 

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris, and the author among other books of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning. 

Daryna Gladum Ukrainian poet, translator, and performance artist. Her book of poems, To Hack a Tree, was published in Kyiv in 2017. 

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian poet, translator, designer, and performance artist, and is the author of several books of poetry.

Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian-American poet. Her most recent book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, recently was awarded the International Griffin Prize. 

Jaroslaw Anders is the author most recently of Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose.

Elliot Ackerman’s new book, The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan, will be published this summer. 

James Wolcott is the author of Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs. 

William Deresiewicz’s new book The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture will be published in August. 

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and the author, among other books, of A Brief Eternity: The Philosophy of Longevity. Jennifer Gore is a translator in Washington, DC.

Jean de La Fontaine, the author of The Fables, was born in 1621 and died in 1695. Henri Cole is an American poet and translator, and the author most recently of Blizzard: Poems. Claire Malroux is a French poet and translator and the author of Daybreak: New and Selected Poems translated by Marilyn Hacker.

Jonathan Baskin is the Associate Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at the New School for Social Research, and a founding editor of The Point.

Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher, died in 1997. Adam Michnik is the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw and the author of many books. This conversation was translated by Joanna Trzeciak Huss.

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, who was born in 1896 and died in 1981, was an Israeli writer and political figure, and one of the great Hebrew and Yiddish poets of the twentieth-century. 

David Thomson is the author of many books on film and culture, most recently Disaster Mon Amour. 

Helen Vendler is the A Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. 

Devin Johnston’s most recent book of poems is Mosses and Lichens: Poems.