Two years ago, the world lost a great Russian novelist and essayist whose eye for the surreal would have made him a perfect witness to the current moment—and whose satires had a way of turning prophetic. Even when Vladimir Voinovich’s fiction took a fantastic turn—most notably, in his futuristic 1987 novel, Moscow 2042—his writing remained rooted in the realities of Soviet and then post-Soviet Russia. In 2020 America, his work takes on a new relevance. Voinovich was just two months short of his 86th birthday when he died of a heart attack in Moscow on July 27th, 2018. It’s a ripe old age, especially in a country where the average male life expectancy is 65. And yet his death still feels untimely. While his star dimmed in his twilight years, his mental and creative faculties did not. His final novel, The Crimson Pelican, published in 2016 (and still awaiting its day in English), is a work of superb wit and imagination. Voinovich’s legacy has a personal aspect for me. I first fell in love with …

The COVID-19 pandemic’s full impact on higher education isn’t easy to predict. But it’s certain to extend past short-term decisions about whether to hold in-person classes during the coming academic year. Many universities may well be forced to lower tuition rates, as students balk at paying full freight for classes conducted by Zoom. As New York University business professor Scott Galloway put it in a magazine interview back in May, university officials who imagine that they will be able to charge last year’s rates for an even partly virtual experience are existing in a state of “consensual hallucination.” The phrase gave me a chuckle. But this is no laughing matter. Trustees of George Washington University, where I’ve had the pleasure of both studying and teaching, signaled their sense of urgency in a May 18th email blast to the entire university community, wherein they described the COVID-19 crisis as “an existential threat to all institutions of higher education.” The trustees called on the administration to look “beyond minor changes,” and bear in mind that “the status …

When moral visions clash, it’s common for people to assume their opponents have bad motives rather than different perspectives. And it’s usually wrong. If you advocate some policy you believe will save lives, whether it’s a plan for fighting COVID-19, increasing health-care coverage, or reducing homicide, your opponents probably don’t oppose your plan because they want more people to die. They may think their own plan will save lives, or they may be concerned about other values entirely. You may very well have fundamental moral disagreements with them, but the thing you hate most about their position probably isn’t what’s driving them. We see this in the current debates over the new social justice movement. The critics of social justice activists sometimes talk as if what’s driving the activists is a kind of oversensitivity, as if they’re the equivalent of small children having tantrums to get attention. In 2016, for example, an Iowa state legislator introduced the “Suck It up, Buttercup” bill, which would have fined universities offering counseling and “cry rooms” to students upset …