April 2020

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, supported by Downing Street, has persistently denied that attaining herd immunity, by allowing the disease to infect most people, was ever a policy, goal, strategy or even “part of the plan”.

Last month, global downloads of the apps Zoom, Houseparty and Skype increased more than 100 percent as video conferencing and chats replaced the face-to-face encounters we are all so sorely missing.

Remember restaurants? I do, but dimly: candlelight, cloth napkins, a basket of warm bread. Food delivered in courses

Food is a window into any culture. In Soviet society, gender and food were always tightly interconnected, which looks like an ideal representation of the ambiguous nature of Communist ideology...

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.

Up until COVID-19 changed everything, I’d been pretty strict in regards to screen time for my sons. They earned video game time...

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...

A diary can serve as a stimulant to feeling. It can remind the author, whether she is writing from prison or the warfront or a sickbed or—blessedly—from the safety and comfort of her own home, that she is alive.

Work No. 227: The lights going on and off consists entirely of an empty white-walled gallery in which the lights flicker off and on for five seconds apiece.

When we think of cancer, we tend to think of death — but what if it is of the order of life?

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.

This is the third in a weekly baking series dedicated to Leonora Carrington. This recipe fell into my hands on a day I don’t remember...

The poet is born in squalor, his first love. Some of the poet’s favorite words include seedy, shabby, seamy.

Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hamburg, Germany. via Flickr/KeokiSeu (cc) by Stephen R. Haynes Why did 13 people make their way to my campus on a dreary February evening in 2020 for a new class I was teaching on a long-dead German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer? We obviously shared...

Solitude has become a topic of fascination in modern Western societies because we believe it is a lost art – often craved, yet so seldom found...

Both X’ed Out and Vivarium assume an other world that leaks into the main frame world where most of the action happens...

One of my favorite sentences in twentieth-century fiction is the one that goes: “She was a girl who for a ringing phone would drop exactly nothing.” It’s from J.D. Salinger’s short story...

If you want to garden and you’re able, do it now. If you want revolution and you’re able, do it now...

The collaboration between heartland arena rock bard Bruce Springsteen and punk poet goddess Patti Smith which led to “Because the Night”...

Borges wrote, “I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin...