I like parking at the big box store, watching people come out and go in. Swaying winter grasses in the median, sky that brigand Saturday blue. I’m waiting to pick up my son from his guitar lesson. Already masterful, he doesn’t quit. Even Jimi Hendrix continued with a vocal coach, up to the very day…
Our bones will touch in the water one day after the supernova, or maybe it’ll be an Electromagnetic Pulse we bought the old Volvo to outsmart— we escaped the need for computers to govern coffee makers, and made our own kombucha— but one by one the streaked coyotes, wimpled foxes picked off the rooster and…
Depending on how history is written, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be looked back on as the beginning of a third world war. President Zelensky’s government, along with its advocates in allied governments, has been making this argument since the war’s inception. They frame Ukraine as one battlefield in a larger global struggle, one that…
[Innocent wayfarers, beware. This essay contains what are vulgarly known in the trade as “spoilers,” so if for some unfathomable reason you’ve yet to view Succession, Glass Onion, and The White Lotus, tread gingerly and try not to gasp.] It may be the most famous and chewed-over exchange in American literature that never actually took…
Some thirty years ago, with the launch in 1990 by the Bush administration of the “Decade of the Brain,” neurocentrism took hold in the Western world — America, Japan, and Europe. It held on well into the aughts. Neurocentrism is the belief that the brain is the seat of the mind, that they are in…
Is astronomy the key to our wellbeing? If we “learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe,” Plato wrote in the Timaeus, we will attain “the most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras was even more dramatic: And they say that when someone asked Anaxagoras for what reason anyone…
In memory of Michael Porder I September 29, 1939, 20 Maresfeld Gardens, Hampstead, London: on the first Friday after Sigmund Freud’s death, having accepted more than a half-century’s imposed impiety at her husband’s insistence, the seventy-eight year old Martha Freud started to light the Sabbath candles again. Licht-bentshn, as the ceremony is called. You…
He was born in 1886 in Armenia, in a remote mountain village called Pingyan above the Aradzani River. It was not the typical Armenian village of the Ottoman Empire, subjugated by Turkish authorities and terrorized by marauding Kurdish tribes in the guise of tax collectors. Pingyan was an unusual place: it was secure and very…
To my friend Kegham Parseghian With what intoxication! The trees, in the light, Trees in the wind and the rain, Shaggy-tressed trees, trees that to the heavens strain, And saplings green, as sea waves Collapsing to the bosom of the corn strewn, Dazed, all drink of the swelling sunburst of life. With what intoxication! The…
Agnon and Flaubert: the conjunction is, at first blush, altogether unlikely. Their background and the kind of language in which each wrote could scarcely have been more different. Agnon, the commanding figure in Hebrew fiction in the twentieth century and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, grew up in an Orthodox…
If you read this essay you will not become a better person. I will not delineate the most progressive stance that you could take on a recent development in politics or culture, taking into account the various relevant social justice considerations and concluding on a rallying cry. And neither will you be presented with a…
When I was young, I wondered what the essential ingredient in a successful lyric poem actually was. I had learned that a poem did not have to have meter and rhyme, that a poem could do without the first person, and that no topic was impossible to poetry. But when I was disappointed in a…
