At this time two decades ago, President George W. Bush resolved to invade Iraq and topple its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. His decision was the most consequential American foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War, and arguably the most significant foreign policy action of the United States in the twenty-first century. As…
I An old theory has it that the most important architects of classical ballet have all been émigrés. In the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, when ballet became primarily an art of the French courts and acquired some of its enduring characteristics, it was shaped by dancing-masters and composers from Italy. The most influential…
1 Above deck, ice-scarred, off to Albion. ___ Let it be named so, for the dynastic furies combed into heads, pressed into lines of boys shouting ‘here, sir,’ and ‘not here, sir’ at devotion or on the parade ground, leaping over shadows as the sea broke with their names interred in the same roster,…
Six months ago, my yoga teacher decapitated his girlfriend. The police found her torso in the refrigerator of the RV he drove from New Orleans to Black Rock Desert every September for Burning Man. In this mid-size, decidedly regional Southern city — a site of national myth if not national importance — wars take place…
You will never be again What you never were before. Theodor Storm Every morning Odysseus sits on the beach and casts his eyes across the sun-freckled water. The breeze is fresh and the waves rumble gently as they break. He is crying. For seven years he has been a prisoner in paradise, the unwilling consort…
Albert Cohen died in 1981, hailed in France as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His passing barely registered in the English-speaking world; not even the New York Times ran an obituary, and it is unlikely to correct this particular mistake in its “Overlooked” feature. Cohen was the author of a fictional…
2014 On September 4, 2014, the top brass of the Hellenic Coast Guard held a rare press conference at their Piraeus headquarters. Commodore Yiannis Karageorgopoulos presented a series of slides showing the Aegean and Ionian seas, plus a portion of the east Mediterranean south of Crete, which comprise the Coast Guard’s vast jurisdiction. Against this…
The temple is a latch on the skull where four bones fuse: the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid. In anatomy courses at art academies students study the latch and its quadruple planes with the help of diagrams and gypsum reproductions. Students draw and redraw these models, accustoming themselves to the relations of the shapes which…
The mind operates by means of emphasis, especially the mind in the grip of fear or anger. When it brings order to the welter of experience, the mind sometimes exceeds the requirements of coherence and proceeds to exercises in simplification. Out of our many identities, we select one; out of our many loves, we select…
I have been a college teacher for some of the happiest years of my life. When I tell people what I do for a living, what I really do, I say I teach people to think for themselves. It’s still a wonderful way to make a living, but over time I have begun wondering whether…
In 2014 I was hired, for two consecutive spring semesters, to teach writing and literature at one of the officially happiest colleges in America. The place was located in a beatific, temperate environment, with mountain views and imposing, elegant architecture; extraordinary foliage and trees burst from the very pavement, flowers were everywhere. There were outdoor…
I am standing on the quay in the Polish city of Szczecin. The north wind from the Baltic Sea brings a thick gray drizzle that envelops the buildings and the port cranes, creating a sense of stagnant timelessness. A tugboat on the Oder River, almost hidden by the curtain of rain and turned into a…
