March 2020

Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a test, a tryout.

What, exactly, is boredom? It is a deeply unpleasant state of unmet arousal: we are aroused rather than despondent, but, for one or more reasons, our arousal cannot be met or directed.

One spring day in 1629, legions of devils came to call upon Father Urbain Grandier. If we’re to believe his accusers, the priest respond with enthusiasm at the arrival of his demonic charge.

Atomic Garden, an experimental film by Ana Vaz, opens with a purely textual prologue: Aoki Sadako, an elderly Japanese woman, visits her flower garden...

The boy walks slowly across the wasteland, a lone figure—eyes in shadow, looking vaguely at his feet, but knowing, somehow, where he is going.

Martin Eve is able to demonstrate in “Historical Sources for Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Peter Pinguid Society’” that Pynchon consulted a single source...

If you played an instrument before the pandemic, but so badly that it would not have occurred to you to publicly disseminate videos of yourself playing it...

Welcome to the new order. It’s not going to be fun or easy. But maybe you finally can carve out time to finish (or begin) that novel. You can read and write poetry.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction.

It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself unable to write creatively. For months, I could eke out a story or group of poems...

In the summer or fall of 1943, La France libre, the London-based provisional government led by General Charles de Gaulle...

Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.

A little over one hundred years ago, a novel virus emerged from an unknown animal reservoir and seeded itself silently in settlements around the world.

The experience of SARS traumatized Hong Kong, and the memories have endured in the territory’s collective consciousness....

On the dot of noon yesterday, we received text messages from the government telling us to observe the ‘strict rules’ laid down by the president of the republic.

While I had much success in my multiple attempts to create relationships where I was the person switching the intimacy dimmer higher or lower based on how well my expectations...

I think I'm finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I've been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so...