To grow up, as I did, in a country that had been under Nazi occupation less than a decade before I was born, was to be very sure about who had been good and who had been evil. Where I lived, in The Hague, we refused to buy candy from a local tobacconist, because the…
The late Michael Longley told of how, one Saturday morning in the middle of the 1970s, when tribal warfare in Northern Ireland was becoming bloodier by the day, and even more so by the night, he and his wife, the literary critic and academic Edna Longley, were having a weekend lie-in, when he heard from…
December 2024 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Russia’s first war against Chechnya, begun by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994. Chechnya had been conquered by the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century in a decades-long and very cruel military campaign that combined the Russian colonization of the area and the genocidal removal of the indigenous population. …
Under the pearl-hued sky of Paris, as a welcome spring breeze ruffled the trees above, I walked with a friend through Montparnasse Cemetery to pay our respects to a long-dead artist we both admire. As we wove our way through the marble headstones, we passed a group of people convening around a grave. At first,…
The first time I was beaten up by police I was sixteen years old. It was March 8, 2004, and more than four thousand feminists had gathered in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate International Women’s Day. Hundreds of security forces were dispatched to the park to prevent our rally from going ahead. They were especially…
From Istanbul, you can witness the entire changing world and see the sedimentary layers of empires upon which that world was built. On either side of the city, there are Ottoman-style mosques. In their previous lives in Byzantium, some of the city’s mosques were Orthodox churches. Beyond the graveyard of Ottoman and Byzantine imperium, there…
The production opened with a stutter. Entering through the aisles of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five actors in Ibsen’s Ghosts made their way to the stage and picked up bound scripts that were waiting for them on what would become the Alving family’s dining table, as if getting ready for rehearsal. Ella…
In “Songs Among The Ruins,” an essay that he published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, the English poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote: In the best works of poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath one finds not just a cerebral attempt for the distinguishably United States idiom but an impassioned…
Consider a political dissident who defies a ruthless dictator, is captured by the regime’s henchmen, and is publicly tortured to death. Your response would likely be outrage — you might appeal to Amnesty International, call for sanctions, or demand that the dictator be tried in The Hague. The Stoics reflected on a similar case in…
All my life, reading has made me feel on the verge of something, like a bird turning in the wind to lay itself bare before going higher — with feet stretched out behind — higher than the indifferent trees and noisy earth. I’m grateful to my teachers who nurtured this experience, education being our first…
Mutants are not so very interesting as wild types and other natural strains, like penguins wearing tuxedos and tigers with black-striped orange fur. With my regular looks and manners, I am no mutant made of chemicals. Still, the world makes no sense to me, and sometimes it’s as if I am wearing the wrong eyeglasses….
A man doesn’t cease to exist because he is invisible. He is like a lone guitar, or curly neck-hairs, or false water. Pull his arm when you go by, and he forgets it once was a fin (according to Darwin). Another year passes, never to be lived again. I remember being touched, but I cannot…
