Earl Warren’s retirement in June 1969 ended his run as Chief Justice of the most progressive Supreme Court in American history. Richard Nixon appointed Warren Burger to replace Warren, and Republican presidents selected the next five Justices over the seventeen years that Burger presided as Chief Justice. And yet the Burger Court, while tacking a…
In the summer of 2020, otherwise a time of maximum disunity in the United States amid intersectional upris-ings, rioting, and widespread institutional deliquescence, a rock-like national consensus emerged from the political waves: Americans from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to Donald Trump, who vehemently disagreed on everything else, fully agreed that it was urgent to…
“You ask me how Commerce began… One day, all of a sudden, Valéry said: ‘Why couldn’t we continue our meetings by publishing our discussions in a review? As a title I suggest Commerce, the commerce of ideas.’ That idea delighted all of us there. The editors (Larbaud, Valéry, and Fargue) were appointed immediately. Adrienne Monnier…
Why won’t you let me be glory, standing there in the mountainous half-bright shadow, fallen step-by-step down the staircase where a bad smell, urine and something else, unarguably an ultimate flaw, good to ignore years before but now not, not with you there above me, looking down, hardly clear, hard silent, except for cricks on…
i.m. Donald Rodney (18 May 1961 – 4 March 1998) Emblems of countless martyrs devoured by the Atlantic, who remembers that slavery was monarchical, that historical atrocity came directly from the divine head, that gravity cannot be numbered. Do not seek to be venerated or to win the appraisal of civic awe, like for instance…
All me sparks fly all night; all my mouth axle bright, wheel the true guillotine serpents’ fleck amber sweat off my waistline, sibilant as touch-me-nots’ shuttered leaves rattling Death in the Arena. Honey Blight and Armageddon. I am Thorn Tongue, bare sprite-child nerved against neon slush and ants trap, I squeal, bitten, “Mother O mother……
Paleontologists disagree about whether dinosaurs were thriving or had already entered a long decline when an extinction event finished them off sixty-six million years ago. Depending on who is right, the asteroid that struck Earth either radically changed the direction of evolution or merely accelerated an established trend. Disasters that target the currently dominant species…
According to Wallace Stevens, “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” We often put “the idea” in a brief phrase: “the evils of war.” We rarely talk about the poetry of the idea. By itself, the theme, the idea, is always banal: it…
After almost three-quarters of a century, how are we now to think about Lolita? It may well be the most commented on novel written in English in the past hundred years, alongside Joyce’s Ulysses. In the case of Ulysses, the imperative for commentary is chiefly a consequence of the invitation to exegesis generated by that…
Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In our age of roiling discontent,…
A young king, swashbuckling, expensively schooled in rhetoric and swordplay, with your gold-threaded tunic and plumed helmet fitted over your patrician nose: so you tossed bandits off cliffs and captured a bull—what do you know about war? Labor is for peasants, labor pains for women. But you waded among the suppurating dead on the fields…
—when angels fell out of the bookcase along with old newspapers, torn road maps from decades past, and a prize edition of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry : suddenly the catalogue tumbled. The painting, the show, Peter Blume’s Recollection of the Flood, the studio where I slept as a child those nights when…
