March 2018

In December 1945, Ezra Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. He was then 60 years old, internationally famous, and under indictment for treason against the United States.

On a research trip to the Kamituga gold mine in her home province of South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), activist Marie-Rose Shakalili noticed something that’s often minimised in stories about mining in her country...

In essays and interviews, Lorca made clear that his allegiance was not to Spain, or even to Granada, but to the Vega, the rich plain to the west of the city where his father farmed, the land nourished by the rivers Darro and Genil that flow down from the...

What then does it mean that school shooters are mostly young white boys? Subconsciously and consciously for some, school shooters exemplify white privilege.

Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective ‘glacial’. I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the rebuke: ‘You’re proceeding at a glacial pace. You’re skating on thin ice.’

February 1968. Radical leftists from all over the world are in West Berlin to attend the International Vietnam Congress.

The distinction between the “logic of the once-and-for-all” and the “logic of Einmal ist keinmal” points to the larger, definitional distinction between the tragic and comic genres.

Surveillance capitalism – with smartphones, laptops, and the increasing numbers of ‘internet of things’ devices making up its physical infrastructure, watching and tracking everything we do...

I recently returned from a three-month stay in Budapest, where I was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University—a splendid graduate school of social sciences and philosophy founded by George Soros...

On the shores of Midway Island, the juvenile albatross skeletons encircle a stomach’s worth of plastic shards, pen caps, bottle tops, the insidious end to all species’ endocrine systems innocuously named “nurdles.”

As a kid, you are tossed incessantly against your own limitations. So much about the world is unfathomable; your job is to dispel some of the dimness, with help from adults and firsthand experience.

In Santiago there’s a stereotype I’ve heard many times, that while most Argentines are ‘big readers’, Chileans ‘don’t read’...

Deadpan, unhurried, and sensitive, Aki Kaurismäki’s 2017 film The Other Side of Hope tells the story of a young Syrian immigrant, Khaled.

A student who later dropped my poetry class wrote to me at the beginning of spring semester: “I want to understand everything I’m familiar with and unfamiliar with. I believe a deeper understanding of poetry is where I should start.”

A few years ago one of my rare bookworm students asked me for a list of suggestions for “adventure” reading. But when I gave it to her, she seemed disappointed...

"Mexico is a surrealist country", my host tells me in the living room of his Centro Historico apartment as we ponder over his collection of works by Alan Glass. I'm in Mexico City...