Ars Est Mendacium

There is something mildly audacious about Bavaria overlooking the Potomac. Shepherdstown , anchored quietly by   Shepherd University , does not advertise itself as alpine. It offers brick sidewalks, old storefronts, river light, and the slow hum of a historic town that has outlived louder eras. And then, up the hill, the Bavarian Inn rises like it took a wrong turn somewhere near Stuttgart and decided to stay. Early December only deepens the effect. The air sharpens. Darkness comes sooner. The building glows. Inside, carved wood beams frame the room. Servers move through the dining area in dirndls and lederhosen , not with theatrical exaggeration, but with the calm assurance of people who have done this long enough that it no longer feels like a costume. The theme is not a wink. It is a commitment. In a dining culture obsessed with sleek minimalism and restaurants that pretend they just happened accidentally, there is something refreshing about a place that says, no, we are this,...

Some songs don’t begin when the music starts. They begin when you’re far enough away for memory to get loud. That’s the condition this song assumes. Not a celebration. Not tourism. Not civic pride. Distance. In 1947, a film called   New Orleans   introduced what would become one of the most enduring standards in American music:   "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans ," written by Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter , performed on-screen  by   Louis Armstrong   and   Billie Holiday . On paper, it looks like a regional love letter. Moss-covered vines. Mockingbirds. Mardi Gras . Creole tunes drifting through humid air. The Mississippi River rolls lazily toward spring. But listen to the grammar of the first line. “Do you know what it means…” It doesn’t say,   Isn’t it beautiful? It asks whether you recognize the condition of missing. The song builds its case gently. It reconstructs New Orleans in sensory fragments, like someone laying out photog...

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...