On the last page of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena Greco, or “Lenu,” ascends in an elevator and closes herself in her apartment. There she examines the two dolls that she and her closest friend, Lila, played with as girls—objects once ablaze with meaning, now smelling of mold and seeming, to her eyes, “cheap and…
When he was sixteen years old, Egon Schiele painted Landscape of a Meadow with Houses in oil on a rectangular cut of cardboard. A little higher than the landscape’s horizontal center a thick band of green, unevenly applied in a gently undulating motion, cuts across the scene from the left, where the paint is thickest,…
for Thea Wieseltier I In the spring of 1866, on the front page of Ha’Carmel, a Hebrew literary weekly that appeared in Vilna for a few decades in the latter half of the nineteenth century and served as an important organ of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which was beginning its exhilarating and damaging…
Consider a showdown between an institutionalist Chief Justice of the United States and an ambitious and opportunistic President of the United States — a showdown in which the Chief Justice wishes to both lay bare the president’s violations of law and norms, and to bolster the Court’s power and authority. And yet the president is…
Ali Khamenei is a man of obdurate dogmas and dogged animosities. Since becoming the “Supreme Leader” of Iran some thirty-six years ago, he has played a pivotal role in the Islamic Republic’s every strategic decision. He has rarely missed an opportunity to choose a pathway detrimental to Iran’s national interests, or even to the survival…
Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to history, to think anew, rather than be beholden to one’s oldest, fondest, but no longer…
Though democracy is ostensibly the opposite of monarchy, the mass culture that is American democracy has betrayed in every age a deep atavistic yearning for royalty. From the days of “King” Andrew Jackson to those of the “Kingfish,” Huey Long; from the era of the Robber Barons to the age of the movie “kings” and…
I was born in Dura, in the hills of Hebron southwest of Jerusalem, into a family that carries love for the land and the memory of loss with quiet dignity. My grandfather was a Palestinian fida’i (a martyr or “sacrifice”) who was killed by the Israeli security forces in 1978. I was taught the details…
My father was a librarian, an archivist, and a rare books collector. I grew up surrounded by books which were a hundred years older than I was nestled beside stacks of long-defunct short-lived Irish literary magazines, many of which were never digitized. My father would open his latest find to the copyright page, explaining why…
For nearly a decade, Clean House television host Niecy Nash would start each episode standing on a stoop or in a driveway to introduce “the show that rescues families from a cluttered home.” In a series of cuts rich with delightfully harsh commentary (“how did two little ladies make such a big mess?”) her team…
If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar…
Divination I God god god I heard the word rattling and buzzing in the cubicle of the elevator car, thwacking the walls and rebounding as it rode relentlessly up and down in the School of Theology every day, every evening, season after season; it escaped, too, down the fluorescently dazzled linoleum halls when the door…
