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.
Read MoreNot long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.
Read MoreDorothy 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.
Read MoreAs an Advent rumination, I’d like to consider El Caganer. In the accumulated cultural esoterica of the Christmas season, from the horned and fearsome demon…
Read MoreThe dream I had before waking up this morning: / A cat jumping up to the sky
Read MoreIt is a repeat of 2014 when yellow umbrellas bloomed across the city. Now someone says all protesters are rioters, disrupting Hong Kong’s daily routine…
Read MoreTwo books about solitary poets travelling the Mediterranean and writing poems came my way within a relatively short period of time; it made sense to treat them within the same space.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers…
Read MorePerched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg.
Read MoreWhitman needed not a mere celebrity endorsement, not just an appreciative aesthete, but a lover in Russia; a passionate, devoted reader who would accept him without judgment.
Read MoreAmartya Sen is reasonable in saying that Narendra Modi, re-elected as Prime Minister of India last week, has simply won the vote share, but not the battle of ideas.
Read MoreThe final phase of voting in India recently concluded with approximately 62% turnout. If one is to pay attention to the outrageous exit polls, it looks like the joke is going to be on me…
Read MoreWith the most expensive elections in the world taking place as we speak, comes a raucous confusion around funds and bribes. Are they distinguishable at all?
Read MoreDavid Knechtges just emailed me / to respond to a footnote. / Is beauty independent of meaning?
Read MoreTen thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes…
Read MoreSo spoke a fairy bestowing a gift upon an infant Vernon Lee in a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1915. The tale, resembling that of Sleeping Beauty…
Read More“Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta…
Read MoreThree years after David Bowie’s death, one of his last, cryptic videos leaves us wondering what his final message might mean for us…
Read MoreIs there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate, in what the extremely online Twitter users are with gleeful irony calling the ‘discourse’ of the present moment?
Read MoreIn late summer and early autumn of 1765, Rousseau was on the run. He was always fleeing some sort of persecution: at times very real, and legal; at others perhaps more perceived, and highly personal.
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