Is the only kind of magic left to literature dark magic — the power to harm with words? Recent debates in literary studies sometimes make it seem so. Consider the most-downloaded episode of the C19 Podcast, a podcast series produced by The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The episode, which appeared in 2019, is called “The…
When does a democracy tip into crisis? When is simply defending it no longer enough, and when does resistance become necessary? These were the questions that Thomas Mann (and many others) faced in the fall of 1930. For his “German Address,” subtitled “An Appeal to Reason,” he returned to Berlin’s Beethoven Hall — the same…
It is very easy to bike into town to get provisions at the country store or at one of the farm stands, and appear like another Brooklynite up for the summer. The truth is that I am an interloper. To me, the town looks like a Raymond Carver story, an Edward Hopper painting, or any…
Forty years have passed since Mahmoud Darwish released his extraordinary micro-allegory, Anā Yūsufun Yā Abī, “I am Joseph, Father.” This was based, of course, on the biblical story of Joseph, widely appreciated for its psychological depth, acclaimed by Robert Alter as “the preeminent instance of biblical narrative as a fictional experiment in knowledge.” It is…
My grandmother sent us to catch a frog when I was about 13. Down to the riverbank we went, me and my cousins, tingling with the unease endemic to being assigned a task you don’t quite understand. In those days we used to catch frogs for the sport of it, and cruelly inflate them and…
The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselves to it so that we may be relieved of the jagged responsibility of interrogating our own complicity —…
A preliminary example of what not to wish for our country on its semiquincentennial One of the consequences of the American crisis has been a country-wide obsession with the definition of America, as if there will ever be only one. Political philosophy is now a national sport. The madness of our political circumstances has returned…
I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States says. It’s one of the cheapest. Donald Trump tells lots of dopey lies about wind. “If you have a windmill…
The gods are once again at play in the public square. Around the globe, political claims are being advanced in the name of religion. Speaking in the Rose Garden on a spring day in 2024, President Trump declared that “we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.” In the American political…
I was already at work on an analysis of the Ukrainian word svoï, a little worried that it might be received as merely a linguistic exercise, a bit of pedantry, when I was unexpectedly assisted by the Ukrainian historian, writer, and public intellectual Olena Stiazhkina (whose novel, Cecil the Lion Had to Die, a linguistic…
I have come to recognize a certain kind of full-on insomnia as an aura, as before a headache, of a gestating poem. Which is not to say that these poems spring fully formed, Athena-like, out of the brain. Maybe it is how an oyster feels when the irritant gets under their nacreous skin. It’s possible…
This is one of an Iranian journalist’s dispatches from protests, morgues, and funerals over two weeks in January 2026, offering a rare ground-level view of what Amnesty International calls a “massacre.” Shared via an encrypted channel, these dispatches provide a firsthand account of a crackdown. Dear sister, hello. Today is January 8. It is 12:15…
