The great British historian E. P. Thompson once remarked that “India is not an important country, but perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. Here is a country that merits no one’s condescension. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist,…
“She is brown,” I said to you, less in annoyance than wonder when she flew past us with a certain flamboyance not over but under our gate to settle down into the tree beside her mate. “But he is black,” you replied, “and the name is his.” “As it always is,” I poked. “I was…
In that instant, dear daughter, when they flashed like cupid’s arrow through the current of saltwater where you splashed, more narrow and more terse than any gleam, I thought I felt within my gut love’s old curse entering the dream — that through no fault of yours but beauty, fresh as it is fierce, you…
A ladybird, or ladybug (call it what you will) has crept onto my pillowcase — this one so small it can hardly be seen. Except I do see it; it is marking the place where I slept like a bloodstain. You shrug, tell me it’s good luck, give our duvet a perfunctory sweep. But I…
after Petrarch In August, out on the veranda, it is not uncommon for a moth to fly into the light and singe its wings to dust. The lantern is so beautiful — it must. I used to watch them burn and wonder why, before I came to understand the bit about desire, how there’s no…
When I was eleven years old, reading Robert K. Massie’s Nicolas and Alexandra, I encountered the longest word I had ever seen: counterrevolutionaries. It muscled out most other words in the line, squatting nigh unpronounceably, like an undigestible bolus or sedimentary rock, all prefix and suffix. Even though it had no sensuality or visual aspect…
Democratic theory, like democracy itself, comes in various shapes and sizes. There are today two leading theories of democratic legitimacy. Realist theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl focus on actual political institutions such as voting, competitive elections, and party elites. These are regarded as not only the necessary but also the sufficient conditions…
In 1955, The American Scholar published a discussion among influential writers and editors titled “What’s Wrong with the American Novel.” In the symposium Ralph Ellison remarked that “I just feel that we are called upon to do a big job, not because someone is going to give us a star on the report card, but…
Agnieszka Holland was six years old when she heard the word “Jew” for the first time. It was in Warsaw in 1954 — several decades before one of the films she directed was first nominated for an Oscar. She was playing with the local toddlers and one of the gang called her a “dirty Jew.”…
Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. J.D. Vance Where the elite meet. Margo Channing I “You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” So said J.D. Vance in his bootlicking acceptance speech at the Republican convention last summer….
Among the thousand currents of the university turmoil during these last several months, the tiny ripple that most securely caught my eye was a distinctly minor scandal at Harvard back in February, which caused not a single broken window or student riot or mass invasion by agents of the state. This was a scandal over…
Alexei Navalny was killed in the far north above the Arctic Circle, in the small town of Kharp, where the Ural Mountains are intersected by a railroad leading to the city of Labytnangi on the Ob River. This place of death, this scene of the crime, is not random. It puts a period to the…
