When one thinks about the Merovingians—and, really, who doesn’t?—one seldom thinks of the Mediterranean. There is good reason for that…
Read More“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…
Read MoreIt’s not any other day anymore. / The overweight policemen are eating pizza / in the spray of chamomile flowers.
Read MoreA single magpie, one for sorrow, on the drive. Waheeda’s car slid up the paving; the bird scuttled to the shrubbery, pausing there, unafraid.
Read MoreLate in 1623, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London fell ill with fever and had difficulty breathing. At 51 years of age, the poet and priest John Donne…
Read MoreMister Rogers typically kept his distance, but when he did break quarantine he would strike against racism and other prejudice…
Read MoreConstant specter of illness and death, increasing likelihood of unemployment, nail in the coffin of the post-World War II order.
Read MoreThomas Travisano paints a structured, sensitive portrait of Bishop. He is at his best when explaining her work, which he immaculately interweaves with her life.
Read MoreThis Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 is a compelling and exhaustive work that examines the long history of anti-black violence and racism in Kansas…
Read MoreTemperamentally conservative poetry critic David Lehman chose only one lyric by Bob Dylan to include in his 2006 The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
Read MoreWhen I was a child, I didn’t see the connection between dreams and life the way I do now. I didn’t see the way that parallel realities influence each other…
Read MoreImagine two couples, each at home for dinner. The first couple spends the whole meal caressing each other’s hair, calling each other cheesy monikers
Read MoreIt begins when the first sunlight shines on the slab. Prometheus is a Titan. To eat his entire liver is hard work for the eagle.
Read MoreWhen people like Irrfan depart, the loss feels personal because within the weave of their stories, a part of our unlivable, untethered, ‘un-salvage-able’ is ennobled and uplifted.
Read MoreIf the lesson from World War II can’t be that the Allies were unassailably good, it can still be that the Axis was unambiguously evil.
Read MoreA Greek soldier once said to me on a private bunk in a ferry boat, “You are a good whore.” Well, I mean to say. This was absurd. I had bedded him.
Read MoreSeeking to regain some ground, the health secretary promised tests for all essential workers (not just health workers), but on its first day the website offering appointments was over-subscribed in under two minutes.
Read MoreYou don’t always—or often—get to hear the whole story in a courtroom. The law is like pouring batter into a mold. The mold is the law but not necessarily the truth.
Read MoreFood 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…
Read More“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück…
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