On Easter Day, April 6, 1903, a violent mob attacked the Jewish population of Kishinev, killing forty-nine people and wounding hundreds. During two days of bloody massacre, about a third of the city was destroyed, leaving hundreds of Jewish families destitute, their meager belongings smashed, broken, torn, or stolen. Hospitals were overwhelmed with injured men,…
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Elizabeth Bishop You know everything will come to an end: the sugar, the tea, the dried sage, the water. Just go to the market and restock. Even your shadow will abandon you when there is no light. So just keep things that require only you: the book…
I wish I had a rescue plane to fly over Gaza to drop wheat flour and tea bags, tomatoes and cucumbers, to remove the rubble of the houses, to retrieve the corpses of my loved ones. I wish for a second rescue plane to drop flowers for children— the ones still alive—to plant on the…
Under the rubble, her body has remained for days and days. When the war ends, we try to remove the rubble, stone after stone. We only find a bone from her body. It is a bone from her arm. Right or left, it does not matter as long as we cannot find the henna from…
After Bob Kaufman The ceiling of my bedroom, my fridge and the stale bread in it, the notebook inside which I hid the love letters from my wife before we married, the foreign coins in my piggy bank , my expired debit cards and my brother’s death certificate, the pieces of shrapnel on or near…
I’m howling, howling in Cairo. I jump off my chair. I hug the closest thing to me, the gray corner of my room, my head glued to it like a stamp so eager to travel. Books on the shelf, they listen to the whispers of my nose as it smells the old paint, as it…
Are we living in a “golden age” of public philosophy, as some claim? There sure is a lot of it, as magazines, blogs, podcasts, and Substack newsletters proliferate. Even the New York Times ran a philosophy column for over a decade in which philosophers shared their thoughts on issues “timely and timeless” with the hoi…
In the doldrums of last summer, I found myself swept up in a fleeting social-media frenzy. I had thought this could not happen to me again. I had myself written an entire book describing the mechanisms that cause such explosions of irrationality, and counseling readers on how to claw their way out of the naïve…
On December 21, 1908, several hundred men and women gathered at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna, settled into their seats, and bore unexpected witness to one of the great revolutions in musical history. Heading the program that night was a new work for string quartet and soprano by a controversial young composer named Arnold Schoenberg, already…
“It’s a sad poem,” Bettina said as we walked down the glistening wet ribbon of a Vienna street one rainy evening. “I don’t read it every day.” Bettina, a Viennese psychoanalyst, was describing the daily walk from her home in Leopoldstadt, in the Second District, to her office in the inner city, the First District….
Those banished from a church are always its elite. They are ahead of their time. ERNEST RENAN I In the eyes of many, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born writer and anti-Stalinist militant, has come to stand for political probity in a time of cowardice and falsehood. The child of exiles from Tsarist Russia, from whom he…
1. There was a myth in college that Renata Adler had come over to America in a suitcase, and that’s how she got her tremor. Students gossiped about her at Bryn Mawr in the 1950s, and so did writers in Manhattan, later on, when she started working for The New Yorker. One man apparently thought…
