When I was still quite young, eight, nine, ten years old, a friend of mine and I took up the idea of making little magazines for each other…
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 MoreThe annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) convention is being held this coming week in my home town of Portland, Oregon.
Read MoreDuring the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, San Francisco had the popular reputation as a sexually liberal wonderland and an international city. At the same time, during the era of increasing nativism and immigration exclusion…
Read MoreI came to philosophy bursting with things to say. Somewhere along the way, that changed…
Read MoreIn May 1913, German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote to the poet and essayist Margarete von Bendemann to express his joy at seeing some ‘magnificent Rembrandts’.
Read MoreAlthough the novel begins on April 4, 1984, in the dystopian empire of Oceania, its inspiration was England, circa 1946. The food is bad, and there isn’t enough of it.
Read MoreBased in the Hudson Valley, Charlotte Mandell has rapidly become one of the world’s most acclaimed translators from French into English…
Read MoreNot even you know what illumination you are seeking in the pubs of London, where the women lightly mock you. “To find solace in stupefaction…
Read MoreAlessio Bolzoni’s sophomore effort finds him intimate with the human form. The photographer’s new book, Abuse II, The Uncanny, features tense shots…
Read MoreThere can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that “last night he dreamed a dream”…
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 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.
Read MoreEach installment in the sequence / is soaked, but bears the stain of some / dried-out forgetting. Re-inscription / requires, at times, a reversal…
Read MoreA baby named Stephen Foster was born, who though white, would grow up harboring the ambition to become the “best Ethiopian songwriter”…
Read MoreThe mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart…
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century…
Read MorePause and reflect on the implications of a white Protestant in the Jim Crow South applying America’s ugliest word to Christ…
Read MoreWhat does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent…
Read MoreIn Texas, Beto O’Rourke came within three points of capturing a Senate seat from Ted Cruz. The excitement generated by his campaign may have …
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