The house is a monolith, where southwest adobe meets Tuscan villa. Swallows nest in its shifted terra cotta roof tiles. Doves mate in a decorative mini-cupola as though it were designed for their union’s ceremony. On the north side, away from the street, cracks spider across the stucco where moisture confronts dry heat. The residents…
For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it contributed) and bombardment, that speaks the loudest in the name of Palestinian liberation. For millions of people across the…
What is the difference between a rat and a squirrel? There is no difference — squirrels are just rats with better PR. So runs the joke. Sometimes I think of artificial intelligence like a squirrel with excellent marketing, its overpaid pundits assuring us that nothing more important has ever happened in history, that it is…
“They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure,” the corporate statement reads, “a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” An initial idea was “Pequod,” but it was rejected for sounding awkward, a bad fit for the product. Eventually the company’s founders settled…
On the long list of things that bother me about much of the left today, especially in the West, is its allergy to patriotism. In my own understanding of human commitments, loving your country and holding socialist ideals are not contradictory commitments. One can easily maintain both. But the history of the left shows that…
June 21, 1988 Dear Joseph Brodsky, It has now been six months since you delivered your Nobel Lecture on poetry and politics, and six months since I first read it in the pages of The New Republic. My first reaction was one of mild disappointment, a sense of having been let down by…
The extreme compactness of biblical narrative is likely to strike almost any modern reader. Some, naively, will attribute it to the relatively rudimentary state of ancient literature that lacks the means to elaborate the details of the stories it tells. The last several decades of literary analysis of the Bible have shown that this is…
Is the only kind of magic left to literature dark magic — the power to harm with words? Recent debates in literary studies sometimes make it seem so. Consider the most-downloaded episode of the C19 Podcast, a podcast series produced by The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The episode, which appeared in 2019, is called “The…
When does a democracy tip into crisis? When is simply defending it no longer enough, and when does resistance become necessary? These were the questions that Thomas Mann (and many others) faced in the fall of 1930. For his “German Address,” subtitled “An Appeal to Reason,” he returned to Berlin’s Beethoven Hall — the same…
It is very easy to bike into town to get provisions at the country store or at one of the farm stands, and appear like another Brooklynite up for the summer. The truth is that I am an interloper. To me, the town looks like a Raymond Carver story, an Edward Hopper painting, or any…
Forty years have passed since Mahmoud Darwish released his extraordinary micro-allegory, Anā Yūsufun Yā Abī, “I am Joseph, Father.” This was based, of course, on the biblical story of Joseph, widely appreciated for its psychological depth, acclaimed by Robert Alter as “the preeminent instance of biblical narrative as a fictional experiment in knowledge.” It is…
My grandmother sent us to catch a frog when I was about 13. Down to the riverbank we went, me and my cousins, tingling with the unease endemic to being assigned a task you don’t quite understand. In those days we used to catch frogs for the sport of it, and cruelly inflate them and…
