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…
Gloucester, Massachusetts I. I’m sorry you were not my favorite. Probably your dark substratum was too much for me. I don’t believe in Hell; therefore, I don’t fear it. I’m no possum playing dead to conceal myself. Reading in your boyhood room, I feel like a counterpart to nature and the animals, and I still…
For my brother, Bryan Lightweis (1977–2024) Comrade, fill no glass for me You might as well cancel the songwriter’s century. Nothing short of that could eliminate his hooks and rhythms, the vocables and caesurae and scansion that have, in each of his songs, a performance history of their own. Born in the American provinces, he…
1. Opera arrived in Naples twice, first among the contortions of myth and then in an unlikely twist of history. The myth is an extravagantly famous one about someone who survives hearing some singing that should destroy him. Homer barely describes the Sirens, but their high voices float all the more forcefully out of the…
