I. In 1888, as a young man, William Butler Yeats found himself in a novel predicament. Having come to his first séance in the hope of making contact with spirits, he felt a tremor, a spasm, a convulsion that flung him into the wall. The circle thought he must be a medium. He steadied himself…
Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; resolve them for me. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground As the blood drips into the vial, I rue how little of genetics I remember. It is April 2017, an eternity since I stared out the window in high school biology. Now I stand here holding Misha’s sweaty palm and relying…
Draft of a Letter: Elizabeth Hardwick to Simone de Beauvoir Dare I say it? He was the best thing that ever happened to me. My man, the poet, mine then not mine, then briefly and nearly mine again. Why and how these things happen you would have said better than I—don’t you think?—free…
I. Live long enough and eventually people will come calling and start asking you questions. In the last decades of his very long life — ninety years, from 1898 to 1989 — the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley became an increasingly attractive target of opportunity for a phalanx of inquiring minds who wanted to pick…
In Notre Jeunesse, or Our Youth, his memoir of the Dreyfus Affair, Charles Péguy, the poet of Catholic France’s salvific mission, wrote that “the prophet in this great crisis of Israel and the world was Bernard Lazare. Let us salute here one of the greatest names of modern times and . . . one of…
January 1, 2026 It’s 12:56 AM. My family and I have just greeted the New Year together. We heard explosions nearby and a siren wailing over the city: Russian drones. Explosions were also reported in Odessa, Donetsk, and the Sumy region, and drones were detected flying in the direction of Kyiv and its surroundings. And…
One thing I learned from farm people: “Close the gate.” I’d pull up to my sister-in-law’s road gate in wide-open Oklahoma, and my wife would jump out of the truck, fiddle with the chain wrapped around the post and secured by a link wedged into a steel slot. She’d swing the ten-foot span of steel…
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…
