The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselves to it so that we may be relieved of the jagged responsibility of interrogating our own complicity —…
A preliminary example of what not to wish for our country on its semiquincentennial One of the consequences of the American crisis has been a country-wide obsession with the definition of America, as if there will ever be only one. Political philosophy is now a national sport. The madness of our political circumstances has returned…
I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States says. It’s one of the cheapest. Donald Trump tells lots of dopey lies about wind. “If you have a windmill…
The gods are once again at play in the public square. Around the globe, political claims are being advanced in the name of religion. Speaking in the Rose Garden on a spring day in 2024, President Trump declared that “we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.” In the American political…
I was already at work on an analysis of the Ukrainian word svoï, a little worried that it might be received as merely a linguistic exercise, a bit of pedantry, when I was unexpectedly assisted by the Ukrainian historian, writer, and public intellectual Olena Stiazhkina (whose novel, Cecil the Lion Had to Die, a linguistic…
I have come to recognize a certain kind of full-on insomnia as an aura, as before a headache, of a gestating poem. Which is not to say that these poems spring fully formed, Athena-like, out of the brain. Maybe it is how an oyster feels when the irritant gets under their nacreous skin. It’s possible…
This is one of an Iranian journalist’s dispatches from protests, morgues, and funerals over two weeks in January 2026, offering a rare ground-level view of what Amnesty International calls a “massacre.” Shared via an encrypted channel, these dispatches provide a firsthand account of a crackdown. Dear sister, hello. Today is January 8. It is 12:15…
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,…
