February 2020

The cover of the little book is green with pink lilies. Love Poems by Emily Dickinson, published by Peter Pauper Press in 1950

In 1961, a mysterious Englishman surfaced in Cambridge, Massachusetts, equipped with a mayonnaise jar full of LSD-infused sugar paste.

Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...

Dorothy Parker lost her job as Vanity Fair theater critic on January 11, 1920, in the tea room of the Plaza Hotel. Parker must have known there was trouble brewing as she sat down across from editor Frank Crowninshield.

In the United Kingdom, in the shadow of a bleak Brexit, brilliant figures have emerged. One of them is Grace Blakeley, a very young commentator on economic issues...

Two ladies on an outing to the Queens Museum one weekend last fall wander into “The Art of Rube Goldberg” exhibition. They enter casually and chuckle at a monitor playing a few moments from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

CNN by Adam Staley Groves Today, love seems more a privation than I could ever remember. Maybe that’s the problem of being aware of it, as if we could ever know love—or—as Foreigner once clamored, “I wanna know what love is.” So if there’s the small violence of certainty...

There was a period of my life when, though I defined myself as a reader and a writer, the words I was consuming weren’t what anyone would recognize as having literary merit.

The title of Elaine Kahn’s new collection, Romance or The End (Soft Skull Press, 2020), feels like an ultimatum. Traditionally—heteronormatively—the end comes just after the wedding

When I picked up the first book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle, I had an unusual reaction: “It’s boring”...

On a Sunday atypical of the usual routine, a lot was felt. A typical Sunday routine consists solely of coffee and reading the newspaper front to back as if the Internet did not exist...

A writer likely will have, like Jeremy Fernando’s grandfather apparently had, a skin condition, an itch. If so, writing is the only lotion that will solve, salve, the skin problem.

Danilo Kiš famously observed that the western bracketing of Balkan literature as narrowly ‘political’ rested on a set of mutually reinforcing stereotypes.

John and Winifred met, and had their miscegenated, crossborder romance, because of the war. Without the war, I was always told, I wouldn’t have existed.

‘The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.’ This phenomenon – observed in the 1930s by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell – has a technical name...

You can get a sense of the tone of this book before even opening it. The title, a dizzy mirror and paradoxical double, casts into doubt fixed ideas of both “India” and “translation”...

Why do we work? Many of us might give a simple transactional answer to the question: we work in order to make money. For the American psychologist Abraham Maslow

Mimosa pudica. Image via Wikimedia Commons From Lapham’s Quarterly: Sometime around the late eighteenth century, the French botanist René-Louiche Desfontaines took a plant on an outing around Paris in a horse-drawn carriage. At the time, botany was just emerging as an independent science separate from medicine and herbalism. Desfontaines, who’d...