July 2017

George Meredith as caricatured by Max Beerbohm in Vanity Fair, September 1896 by Andre Gerard I hope that, like me, you enjoy reading other people’s letters, as this essay depends heavily on personal correspondence. By means of letters I want to make a case that the conception of Mr....

“Left-wing melancholy” was once the title of a review essay that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1931 for the feuilleton section of the German newspaper Die Gesellschaft. 

Yard work is never ending. We have a lot of concrete in our back yard, it’s cracked and uneven and we always trip on it. I hate it. Yesterday I dug up concrete with a big sledge hammer and a pry bar.

Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater...

Genesis tells us that the first men had only one language: this made them so ambitious and powerful they began building a tower high into the sky.

What are we when we become mothers? We may not ever be fully ourselves again, but that’s because our selves have blurred into looser but more schematic ways of being—ways of being that are communitarian, multiple, and endlessly dissolvable.

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

At the highest levels, checkers is a game of mental attrition. Most games are draws. In serious matches, players don’t begin with the standard initial starting position.

by Michael Wood But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. —T. W. Adorno Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a...

The actor playing Olivia happened to be Asian—the first Asian actor I had ever seen onstage, and one of precious few I’d noticed anywhere.

The same year that the US nominated its first female presidential candidate, the Met presented, an opera composed by a woman...

So far this makes it sound as if philosophers are a bunch of science fiction spoil sports. Not so! Although philosophers typically agree that we cannot change the past, most think it possible to causally affect the past.

For some students, Night of the Living Dead opened the door to an angle they had not considered: that a film could be political without being “political.”

Marš Mira is a commemorative march, like others elsewhere throughout the world, that retraces the long, treacherous route that survivors of the Srebrenica genocide followed to escape the Serbian army.

Arbus was clear about what she wanted and why. The trouble is there’s still such scant understanding, let alone appreciation, for what it means to be a woman and wired the way she was.