August 17, 2026
The impulse to separate the literary critic from the mere consumer, the serious reader from the lightweight, is abiding. Several means of demarcation have been used; one is how much interest, and what kind, a reader shows in the person behind the work. The Guardian recently drew a line against the persistent interest in Elena...
Read MoreAugust 10, 2026
The dogs barked as I approached the safehouse, but Kite soon called them off and welcomed me into the small space he shared with other members of the resistance. As he did so, I noticed his prosthetic leg. There was some chatter as I got in; a handful of people lived there. A lanky man...
Read MoreAugust 3, 2026
In Gaza, the womb has ceased to be a sanctuary. Beneath the scorching plastic of displacement tents, surrounded by air thick with toxic dust from relentless bombardment, carrying new life has transformed into a quiet, agonizing battle between the female body and an unyielding reality. Across the Strip, the months of pregnancy no longer carry...
Read MoreJuly 27, 2026
In the small hillside village of Bubbio, home to a collection of steeply planted parcels of Moscato Bianco and a few hundred piemontesi to tend to them, I lodged for a night on the top floor of a converted farmhouse. It belonged to an old man called Giovanni, who had a reedy voice and a...
Read MoreJuly 20, 2026
In April 1989, my mother went to the gate at O’Hare to greet Yukiko Sugihara. Yukiko was 75 and my mother turned 80 a few months earlier. Although they had never met before, they recognized each other without hesitation. My mother took Yukiko’s hands and held them throughout the drive into the city. At her...
Read MoreJuly 13, 2026
In 2004 my wife Kathy was diagnosed with dementia. Over the next eleven years we learned it was likely Alzheimer’s. On March 6, 2015 she died of congestive heart failure. During those eleven years of Alzheimer’s I kept a journal of our lives and our coping. After she died I continued keeping the journal, but...
Read MoreJuly 7, 2026
The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben Gvir, to IDF Chief of Staff Major General Eyal Zamir, to the head of the IDF’s Central Command General Avi Bluth,...
Read MoreJuly 6, 2026
How much time do we have? That’s always the question — the one the disciples fumbled on the mount, the one my portfolio answers nightly in its decimals. I’m the managing partner. I have come to talk about the Antichrist. I find I must begin with blood. Not mine — let the record...
Read MoreJune 29, 2026
It is a very unhappy birthday for the American Republic, to say the least. These days, barely a week goes by when Franklin’s admonition upon leaving the Constitutional Convention “ — if you can keep it” doesn’t echo in the mind. As the inauspicious sestercentennial approaches, the summer is already shaping up to be a...
Read MoreJune 22, 2026
To Posterity When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards And reading and even speaking have been replaced By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste They held for us for whom they were framed in words, And will your...
Read MoreJune 15, 2026
Thrust into time and space, everybody enters in medias res. What had come before? Readers, as Trollope noted long ago, prefer the cart ...
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