This inaugural issue of Liberties includes: Michael Ignatieff on liberalism and the environment; Laura Kipnis cheers transgression; David Grossman on literature and peace; Ramachandra Guha on the Indian tragedy; Thomas Chatterton Williams on the real James Baldwin; Mark Lilla on the power of indifference; Helen Vendler on Yeats' The Second Coming; Sean Wilentz on abolition and American origins; Adam Zagajeweski on Gustav Mahler; James Wolcott on America's modern Jacobins; Andrea Marcolongo on how language defines us; Eli Lake on the birth of American unexceptionalism; Sally Satel on the riddle of addiction; Moshe Halbertal on creating a democratic Jewish state; David Thomson on the wonder of Terrence Malick; Julius Margolin's memoir confronting hatred; Clara Collier on plague literature; Shawn McCreesh's personal look at a youthful community of addiction; new poetry from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, Joshua Bennett, and Hannah Sullivan; and, Leon Wieseltier (editor) and Celeste Marcus (managing editor).