October 2020

Even the Christians who loved to eat pigs vilified them as greedy, dirty, destructive animals. This reputation was woven into the scriptures that early medieval readers studied and quoted and wove into their own stories and texts...

Letters are always self-involved, but Berryman’s are often insufferably self-obsessed, even if they are meant to be letters of condolence...

Black folk took up reparations for slavery as an enduring social movement, bequeathed from generation to generation...

It’s a common enough scenario. A vegetarian has been invited to a friend’s place for dinner. The host forgets that the guest is a vegetarian, and places a pork chop in front of her. What is she to do?

When one thinks about the Merovingians—and, really, who doesn’t?—one seldom thinks of the Mediterranean. There is good reason for that...

And so on, as before, in a roundabout way, using more words to say nothing than necessary...

The analytic approach to mental and emotional pathology has never quite shaken loose its origins in improvised postulation and ethereal supposition.

If the tree is ki, what about the acorns? They agree that the acorns are kin, a whole family of little beings...

I’ve looked towards the apocalypse to hide from my duty to the present, to all of us here living our small lives...

“Aging for me is not a condition, but a subject,” said Agnès Varda in her Norton Lectures at Harvard University in February 2018, shortly before her 90th birthday...

H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds has never lost its power to unsettle, but it has become peculiarly resonant with the arrival of Covid-19...