If, as we are told in Genesis, God created form from formlessness, and gave spirit to blank matter, then it is the puppeteer whose powers achieve something like the divine. Manipulating fingers, strings, hidden voices, shadows, paper cut-outs, or carefully placed lights, the artist crouches beneath or behind the stage and transforms into a kind…
Four years have passed from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Twelve years have passed since the capture of the Crimea and the start of war in eastern Ukraine. In 2022 it became manifestly clear that this was a war undertaken in order to destroy the entire Ukrainian nation. Its genocidal character is…
Is it possible to create an artistic masterpiece whose content is morally and politically loathsome? If so, what should we make of such art? I can think of one clear example: Birth of a Nation, the silent film directed in 1915 by D. W. Griffith. About its repellent message there can be no doubt. The…
Locked in the vault of the cathedral the rubies, emeralds and sapphires of stained glass in their upright coffers. Locked in my throat the shards of tears. I was one among the audience who rose for the Hallelujah chorus and sang our hearts out when we came to And He shall reign forever and ever…
Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” because book reviewers had turned into “Visigoths,” “critical torturers” who took “malicious pleasure” in tearing authors apart. A century and a half later,…
I. In 1888, as a young man, William Butler Yeats found himself in a novel predicament. Having come to his first séance in the hope of making contact with spirits, he felt a tremor, a spasm, a convulsion that flung him into the wall. The circle thought he must be a medium. He steadied himself…
Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; resolve them for me. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground As the blood drips into the vial, I rue how little of genetics I remember. It is April 2017, an eternity since I stared out the window in high school biology. Now I stand here holding Misha’s sweaty palm and relying…
Draft of a Letter: Elizabeth Hardwick to Simone de Beauvoir Dare I say it? He was the best thing that ever happened to me. My man, the poet, mine then not mine, then briefly and nearly mine again. Why and how these things happen you would have said better than I—don’t you think?—free…
I. Live long enough and eventually people will come calling and start asking you questions. In the last decades of his very long life — ninety years, from 1898 to 1989 — the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley became an increasingly attractive target of opportunity for a phalanx of inquiring minds who wanted to pick…
In Notre Jeunesse, or Our Youth, his memoir of the Dreyfus Affair, Charles Péguy, the poet of Catholic France’s salvific mission, wrote that “the prophet in this great crisis of Israel and the world was Bernard Lazare. Let us salute here one of the greatest names of modern times and . . . one of…
January 1, 2026 It’s 12:56 AM. My family and I have just greeted the New Year together. We heard explosions nearby and a siren wailing over the city: Russian drones. Explosions were also reported in Odessa, Donetsk, and the Sumy region, and drones were detected flying in the direction of Kyiv and its surroundings. And…
One thing I learned from farm people: “Close the gate.” I’d pull up to my sister-in-law’s road gate in wide-open Oklahoma, and my wife would jump out of the truck, fiddle with the chain wrapped around the post and secured by a link wedged into a steel slot. She’d swing the ten-foot span of steel…
