I've spent several weeks teaching a writing workshop in Saratoga Springs, New York this summer. It's like a very pleasant children's summer camp for adult poets, novelists and essayists, replete with copious amounts of wine. One of the great joys of the program is that every weekday evening all of the faculty gather at the director's home for a lovely dinner and spirited conversation. At these dinners, visiting writers, often older and of note, come up from New York City and elsewhere to join us before they lecture.

This year the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid came, and I was reminded of a quotation of hers that I had shared on Twitter [now X] several summers ago. "It's really important to protect free speech," Kincaid said. "And it's really important to practice the art of shunning. They can say all the horrible things they want, and I never have to speak to them again."

That was during the feverish days of what some of us now refer to, in retrospect, as "The Great Awokening," or the era of left-wing ideological conformity, which began in earnest during the second term of the Obama administration, peaked in the summer of 2020, and seems to have definitively concluded in the aftermath of Hamas's assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the extraordinary right-wing backlash that has swept American academic, cultural and media institutions ever since.

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