As I monitor the images and information streaming from Ferguson, Missouri, I can’t help thinking of the novelist Charles Baxter’s observation about writing fiction: “If you want a compelling story,” he has advised, “put your protagonist among the damned.” Pictures, some from gifted photojournalists like Scott Olson and Lawrence Bryant, others from fearless amateurs with cell phones, give us glimpses of what hell might look like: smoke, sulfurous fumes, shadows, screams, and volatile armies clashing by night. In the United States right now, there may be no more compelling story than the violence

June 3

On the fourth day of the Palestinian Festival of Literature, we cross the Green Line, the Israeli border established after the 1948 war, and enter Haifa, which slopes down to the sea. The city is the object of particular yearning in the land-locked Palestinian imagination. Most of its Palestinian population fled when the fighting broke out, and was not allowed to return. In Ghassan Kanafani’s classic novella, Return to Haifa, a Palestinian couple caught up in a panicked exodus is forced to escape by boat and leave their newborn child behind. They return twenty years later to find that

May 31

We head from Amman, Jordan, to the Allenby Bridge terminal, the only land crossing into the West Bank open to Palestinians. We are advised not to utter the word palestine to Israeli customs officials, lest they take umbrage and deny us entrance, as they have the power to do. And so the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, as it’s called, enters the West Bank discreetly, afraid of being turned away.

We wait at the terminal for five hours, until everyone else has passed through and the cleaning crews have started their sweeps. But we are armed with patience, and the terminal

Ruben Castaneda may be the nicest crack addict in the history of the drug. His worst transgression seems to be missing his brother’s wedding-rehearsal dinner: He couldn’t tear himself away from his pipe and the strawberry (as a young woman who traded sex for rock was known, back in the proverbial day). He also, in the grips of his disease, began to call people near and far saying he’d lost his wallet, and showed up for work disheveled and reeking of booze.

It’s that work that makes the story Castaneda tells so compelling. At the height of the DC crack epidemic, the author was a crime reporter

In a cartoon that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, Bill Mauldin shows two men at hard labor in a Soviet gulag. “I won the Nobel Prize for literature,” one tells the other. “What was your crime?” In 1958, when the cartoon was published, it was obvious that the hapless Nobel laureate was supposed to be Boris Pasternak, whose literary achievements earned him expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and harassment so unnerving it pushed him to the verge of suicide. “It is not seemly to be famous,” a poem by Pasternak begins. “Celebrity does not exalt.” Yet after the 1957 publication of his only novel,

As much as libertarians and liberals may now be at odds, they endorse the same foundational value. It’s right there in their names: Both political philosophies share the Latin root liber, or “free.” Liberty is a special sort of good that the two poles of American politics, and pretty much every position in between, embrace as fundamental.

What, then, to do about the many conflicts and contradictions that have flowed, with increasing rancor on all sides, from this core commitment to freedom? In Philip Pettit’s judgment, we should rehabilitate a neglected vital tributary of political philosophy: