I “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This must be the most overly admired sentence by the most overly admired writer of our time. It is the renowned opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” a canonical document of high-end alienation, and it long ago achieved fortune-cookie status. Didion was making the…
Historians like to say that correlation is not the same as causation. But evidence of correlation is often the starting point for an inquiry into causation. Here is one such inquiry: How might the loss of humanistic thinking generally, and historical thinking specifically, be connected to the current dysfunction of American politics and to the…
In constitutional law, there are a lot of isms. Textualism claims that the Constitution’s text is binding. The central idea is that judges are bound by the written words of the founding document. (Reasonable textualists acknowledge that the text is often ambiguous. What, for example, is meant by “the freedom of speech”? That is far…
I consider Javier Cercas one of the best writers in the Spanish language, and I believe that, after oblivion has buried his contemporaries, at least three of his extraordinary books — Soldiers of Salamis, The Anatomy of a Moment, and The Imposter — will still have readers who turn to them to learn what our…
“But Mark, you don’t seem to understand, these are good people. These are all good people.” My interlocutor was a long-time administrator at my university, and an accomplished scholar. In his genial way he was trying to set my straight on some important facts. I had just learned that there would be a new aspect…
sitting in the bower after lunch with my sadness like unto Magdalene our defectiveness known all around the town (a passion for extravagant apology) (flimsy promise to do better from now on) I knew the crowd had stones heating the hollows of their hands (the teacher has always shown me the underlying structure of a…
For Moshe Idel Since the very inception of their discipline, scholars of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, have tried to define the object of their study based on its supposed relationship to myth. Gershom Scholem viewed the rise of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages as the return — with a vengeance — of myth. After having…
So many slopes they touched, and once leaned outside while I tromped into the parlor of an alpine monastery, clattering boots, my bluster welcomed to dine silently with the brothers who had also vowed to get to the powder of what is daily fused with life: to glide, to carve, to schuss and float with…
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…
