August 2016

Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street College of Education, was sick of children’s books. She didn’t want didactic moral tales that told kids what to do, or mythological flights of fancy.

After a visit to Haiti in the first week after the quake, Chelsea Clinton, who was traveling with Partners in Health, wrote an email to Bill, Hillary, and their chief aides, describing shock at the “mind numbing” incompetence of many aid workers.

As a genre, the manifesto (the avant-garde variety, not the mainstream political platform) moves in and out of fashion. Political and social upheaval tends to put manifestos back in vogue.

Benjamin hoped that his kind of writing would be, as Jeffries puts it, “a kind of Marxist shock therapy aimed at reforming consciousness,” waking people up to the dream-world they lived in under capitalism.

Blue is often associated with coldness, even sadness. But how could this possibly explain why blue is such a well-loved color — perhaps even the most popular one?

It had a focus on being dominant for centuries without change. Whole groups get excluded because a certain kind of dominant discourse is established.

Judging by the crowd, of which I was part when recently visiting London’s National Portrait Gallery, the attraction of portrait painting is undiminished.

Edi Rama, Blue Lunetta, public intervention, Mantua, Italy (2016). by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Albania and Mantua, the latter a provincial city in northern Italy, the former a country still somehow pretending to be EU-worthy. No one would ever think that these two geographical entities would have any...

Various contemporary continental philosophers have taken an interest in espousing some form of a 'return to religion' but one devoid of actual, material religious belief and practice.

Ever since Underworld, the 1997 book that marked the end of his ambitious middle period, Don DeLillo’s novels have been creepy, inconclusive, and short.

Consider, Boethius. He was a descendent of a noble Italian family, a beneficiary of a classical education, and in some ways the last of the Romans.

Bishop’s letters to her psychiatrist are newsy and notational. One begins with a friend surprising her “with a birthday cak and some mimosa” and concludes with a hairstyling appointment before dinner with Randall Jarrell.

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

Orson Welles was born in 1915, which, in my view, was both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky because it was too late and too modern a year for someone like him—and I’m not referring now to the curious boundary drawn up by my reader, because I think 1914 and 1913...

Putin is now plainly following the same tactic in US electoral politics that he has successfully promoted in Greece and elsewhere: supporting both far-right and left tendencies indiscriminately.

In the mounting heap of blood-soaked images, I have a recurrent dream about Kashmir: a night filled with desolation and toxic smoke. I hear women wailing in the distance. The ground is abysmal and shaky. The street is a litter of limbs and stones and broken glass.

Ferrante, in case you haven’t heard, has become an international phenomenon. She has acquired a certain notoriety not only because her writing is very intense.

The poster for the 1936 Mexican film The Macabre Trunk shows a man in dark glasses and fedora, holding up a bloody hand in a menacing gesture, as a pulp dream of a blonde stretches out an arm to stop him.