He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Entering an unfamiliar classroom for the first time, met by a cacophony of greetings, shuffles, and the flutter of unsettled nerves, a student experiences a particular strain of vertigo — a a kind of thrownness. Unbalanced, she glances about, wondering if…
I don’t see how we get out of this. There is nothing truer that can be said of this time. It is a perverse measure of its truth that we have been inundated with books and bromides that purport to show the opposite, that have hit upon the way out, the solutions, or better, the…
A sickness came over me whose origins were never determined though it became more and more difficult to sustain the pretense of normalcy, of good health or joy in existence — Gradually I wanted only to be with those like myself; I sought them out as best I could which was no easy matter since…
General consensus in our home was candy or soda would kill us, or else rot our constitutions in some larger, metaphysical sense. Body & soul, to cite the old wisdom. In protest, my big sister & I would sneak the stuff through customs whenever we could: Swedish Fish & ginger beer, Kit-Kats, Mary Janes &…
How are you feeling is always your opening question & you know me. I always take it the wrong way when you say it like that. I hear you asking for damage reports, the autobiography of this pile of brown rubble bumbling on about his father’s beauty, this chasm splitting the voice in his unkempt…
To the memory of friends The first thing I remember thinking about what we now call “the opioid crisis” is that it was making everything really boring. It was 2010, I was in eleventh grade and at a house party about which I had been excited all week. I had with me a wingman in…
For some time now it has felt like history is itself the pandemic. In our country and elsewhere, it has been in overdrive, teeming with evils, flush with collapses, abounding in fear and rage, a wounding contest between the sense of an ending and the sense of a beginning, between inertia and momentum, with all…
Consider the plague. I mean the actual, literal, bubonic plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. In this pestilential season the subject has been impossible to avoid, because so many people are calling coronavirus “plague” — even though, as pandemics go, they have almost nothing in common. Plague has an astonishingly high fatality…
Julius Margolin was born in 1900 in Pinsk. After studying philosophy in Germany in the 1920s he moved to Poland with his family, where he became active in Revisionist Zionism and published a Yiddish book on poetry. From there he and his family moved to Palestine. For economic reasons, Margolin returned to Poland in 1936,…
The best American film of 2019, A Hidden Life, was little seen, and nominated for nothing. Why be surprised? Or assume that our pictures deserve awards any more than the clouds and the trees? Try to understand how movies may aspire to a culture that regards Oscars, eager audiences, and fame as relics of our…
Some of these microscopic invertebrates shrug off temperatures of minus 272 Celsius, one degree warmer than absolute zero. Other species can endure powerful radiation and the vacuum of space. In 2007, the European Space Agency sent 3,000 animals into low Earth orbit, where the tardigrades survived for 12 days on the outside of the capsule. —The Washington Post, “These Animals can…
The question of whether Israel can be a democratic Jewish state, a liberal Jewish state, is the most important question with which the country must wrestle, and it can have no answer until we arrive at an understanding of what a Jewish state is. A great deal of pessimism is in the air. Many people…
