Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties.Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties.Laura Kipnis is the author, most recently, of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis.Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago.Bernard-Henri Lévy is the author most recently of The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope. This essay was translated by Steven Kennedy.Bruce D. Jones is the author of To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World's Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers. He is the director of the Project on International Order and Strategy and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.Durs Grünbein is a German poet and essayist. His most recent collection of poems in English is Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City.David Greenberg teaches history at Rutgers University and is completing a biography of John Lewis.Ingrid Rowland is the author, among many books, of From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town. She teaches at Notre Dame.David A. Bell is a professor of history at Princeton University and the author most recently of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.Nathaniel Mackey’s most recent volume of poems is Breath and Precarity.Robert Cooper is a British and European diplomat, and the author of The Ambassadors: Thinking about Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times.Steven M. Nadler is a professor of philosophy and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the author of many books on Spinoza and the seventeenth century.Morten Høi Jensen is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jans Peter Jacobsen.Clara Collier is a writer in California.Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.Haris Vlavianos is a Greek poet, translator and historian.