Ars Est Mendacium

I sometimes imagine John Stuart Mill sitting in a modern airport, watching cable news on mute . He’d see the captions scroll past. “LIBERTY UNDER ATTACK.” “FREE SPEECH CRISIS.” “DEFENDING OUR VALUES.” He would probably sip his tea, blink twice, and ask the nearest traveler, “Yes, but by whom, and for what reason?” Because Mill was irritating that way. He refused to let big words remain big and undefined. We talk about liberty today the way we talk about cholesterol. We know it’s important. We’re not entirely sure what it is. And we’re certain someone else has too much of it. On Liberty , published in 1859, is not a rant. It is a framework. A careful, almost annoyingly logical attempt to answer one question: when is society justified in interfering with the individual? Mill gives us four major pillars. Four guardrails. Four things we would do well to tape to our national refrigerator. Let’s walk through them. First: The Harm Principle . The only legitimate reason to restrict someone’s...

We discuss empowerment extensively in our time. We put it on conference panels. We print it on tote bags. We frame it as rupture, as declaration, as a door kicked open. But stand in front of   The Banjo Lesson   long enough, and you begin to suspect that real empowerment does not begin with a speech. It begins with proximity. Look carefully at the bodies. The woman sits forward, the banjo angled across her lap, shoulders set in quiet concentration. She is not turned toward the girl. She is not theatrically guiding smaller fingers into place. She is playing, or about to play, demonstrating something she already knows. The young girl does not face her as a pupil across a table. She leans from behind, almost folded into the woman’s back, peering over her shoulder at the fingerboard. Her chin hovers near that shoulder. Her eyes track the exact placement of fingers. She is not yet performing. She is studying. That spatial decision is the thesis. Mary Cassatt   painted this pa...

I realized something was wrong about halfway through   Napoleon , and it wasn’t a detail I could point to on screen. It was quieter than that. The film was still loud, still busy, still impressively staged, but I had stopped leaning forward. I wasn’t confused by the plot so much as detached from it, as if the movie and I were watching each other from opposite sides of the room, neither quite sure what the other wanted. That feeling never left. This is not a complaint about historical accuracy . That argument misses the point and always has. History on film is interpretation, compression, and emphasis. The question is never whether a film gets every detail right. The question is whether it knows what it is trying to say. This one does not. Is it a love story ? A biopic? A psychological portrait ? A condemnation of war and imperial ambition ? The film gestures toward all of these possibilities, sometimes within the same sequence, then backs away before committing. What remains is not...

I have avoided soufflés for most of my adult life. Not because I dislike them, but because soufflés carry stories. Stories of doors slammed shut, of ovens opened too early, of proud dishes collapsing like punctured balloons while guests politely insist they weren’t that hungry anyway. Soufflés have a reputation for exposing overconfidence. They are the culinary equivalent of saying something brave in a meeting and immediately realizing you misread the room. So naturally, the next recipe in the 1963   Good Housekeeping Cook Book , sitting there without ceremony, offered no warnings. We are still cooking our way through   Susan ’s   section of the book, a part of the volume that speaks in a voice both reassuring and faintly unbothered by your feelings. Susan, whoever she was, writes as if you already know what you’re doing, or at least ought to. There are no motivational asides. No “don’t worry if it looks wrong.” Just instructions, presented as facts. Melt butter. Stir fl...

There is a specific kind of dinner that happens on work trips. It involves a loud room, an aggressively upbeat server, and a menu engineered to impress someone who is not present. You eat well enough, shout your opinions across the table, and leave with the vague sense that you were fed but not actually nourished. This was not that dinner. This was a quiet night. Midweek. No buzz. No scene. Just a handful of Forrester colleagues who had collectively reached the same conclusion, we had no interest in being entertained. We wanted to sit down, eat something serious, and talk like normal people. Which is how we ended up at  Iron Works BBQ , a place that has absolutely no interest in impressing you and is better for it. Iron Works does not announce itself. It doesn’t frame its history on the wall or tell you why it matters. You walk in and immediately understand the tone. Concrete floors. Smoke in the air. Tables that exist to hold food, not laptops. The room feels less like a restauran...

A group of educated men stand around congratulating one another on their cleverness. One of them proposes a challenge. Take a woman marked by her voice, remake her, and return her improved as proof of intellectual superiority . It is framed as intellectual play. As a test of skill. As something harmless enough to be wagered over drinks. What’s notable is how little  My Fair Lady  asks us to question that framing. From its opening moments, the film is remarkably candid about what is happening. This is not a rescue narrative . It is not even, at heart, a story about aspiration. It is an experiment conducted in public, with witnesses, rules, and agreed-upon measures of success. Eliza Doolittle is not invited into a new world. She entered a contest whose terms were set before she understood she was playing. That clarity is why the film remains so uncomfortable when watched without nostalgia, acting as insulation. Higgins never pretends to improve Eliza for her own sake. He "impro...