This black train, puffing out clouds of white smoke, still races towards the viewers. They say some jumped up in fright, thinking the catastrophe was about to occur. The light on the wall of the salon, light from an incarnate summer’s day – so different from the Paris light at the same moment, outside on…
Enough of these silver spoons and tropical helmets, widows’ broaches and porcelain; enough of these bent and antiquated bird cages, and the photo portraits of dead children. Set up in rows on wobbly tables, under canvas in wind or bad weather, what do they say, what do they hide, these remnants of the nameless crimes…
In May 2021, a newly hired journalist at the Associated Press, a twenty-two-year-old Stanford graduate named Emily Wilder, began posting provocative musings on Twitter about fighting between Israel and Hamas. Wilder had not been assigned to write about the Middle East. She may have thought she was tweeting as a private citizen. But the Associated…
Whenever sabers begin to rattle somewhere in the world, I am irresistibly drawn back to Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly clash between Athens and Sparta that raged from 431 to 404 BCE and engulfed most of the Greek-speaking world in its chaos. He wrote, perhaps, precisely…
To understand Éric Zemmour, the ultra-right candidate who has garnered so much attention in the French presidential election this spring, it helps to go back all the way to April, 1793. On the thirteenth of that month, France’s ruling National Convention voted the arrest of the deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat. The violent rhetoric that…
—book of the there we’d have been— We remained entranced by words positing a world beyond their reach, that words don’t go there said with words. They were speaking for the we that was no we they knew. It wasn’t music went where words were unable,…
Something new and unexpected is happening in Myanmar. No, not the most recent coup d’état. Few countries have had so many coups as Myanmar. The surprise is that, a year later, the military are still not in control. That is what has never happened before. On February 1, 2021, when a new parliament was due…
Can anything surprise us anymore? A madman with no political experience who boasts of sexually assaulting women is elected president of the United States, and the only thing that keeps him from doing irreparable harm to the American republic is his own stupidity and incompetence. A rabid mob of citizens, incited by his lies and…
Pity literary biographers. There are few writers less appreciated, there are none more despised. There they sit, with their church bulletins of family trees and their dental records, their interviews with ex-lovers, mad uncles, and discarded children, and go about “reconstructing” the life of someone they never knew, or knew just barely. To George Eliot,…
Name a classic Western of the 1950s starring a great actress of the 1930s. She should play a woman of power and influence, maybe with a little bit of a dominatrix vibe. (When critics talk about the film, they will probably call it “psychosexual”.) It is highly stylized. Whatever happens in it, it doesn’t take…
England with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral, with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the criterion of suitability and convenience: and Italy with its equal shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified…
What makes you think I can live in a room from which you have removed – admittedly with considerable tact – one of the four walls? I agree, the view has really improved (not that you can see the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio in the distance) but is the (let’s call it) “radical renovation”…
