THE DILIGENT Prussian bureaucrat E. T. A. Hoffmann had a mischievous double. By day, he worked as a jurist in the courts of present-day Poland and Germany; by night, he wrote impassioned music criticism in the voice of his alter ego Johannes Kreisler, a tempestuous composer who also appears in several of Hoffmann’s stories and novellas. The wild cry that rings out in his first novel, The Devil’s Elixirs (1815), could just as well describe his own adventure in bifurcation: “I am what I seem to be, yet do not seem to be what I am; even to myself I am an insoluble riddle, for my personality has

THE NOSTALGIA AMONG LIBERALS for the Obama presidency has lately crested such that it’s a surprise that proposals to overturn the 22nd Amendment haven’t gained traction, even in the fantasy realm of non-feasibility where a lot of American political thinking occurs. Given the centrist fetish for norms and process, a restoration of Barack Obama would be beyond the pale. Let him podcast, produce content for Netflix, and issue biannual lists of his middlebrow fiction faves. Still, there are believers in the restoration of another Obama, both on the paranoid fringe and in the dismayed middle. Lately

BY NOW IT’S CLEAR that the academic humanities—that supposedly disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, preserved from the whims of the market—are under threat. But that threat is perhaps best personified not by a powerful politician loudly looking to defund “ripoff” programs, but by an ordinary guy pursuing a PhD in Business Studies. This is a guy who’s getting an advanced degree not to save his soul or to preserve and expand the edifice of human knowledge but to destroy both. He is at once the ideal consumer and the ideal product of the modern university increasingly run like a

FILMMAKER ANNA BILLER begins her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, with a warning: “Some husbands,” she writes, “are pussycats, some are dullards or harmless rogues, and some are Bluebeards.” Folklore and literary history are full of Bluebeards: Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale, two Brothers Grimm versions, Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, modern retellings by writers, composers, and directors ranging from Georges Méliès and Béla Bartók to Helen Oyeyemi and Catherine Breillat. The elements of the story remain essentially the same: a young woman marries a mysterious, wealthy widower. Despite