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March 25, 2019
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Clay Risen

Clay Risen is a senior staff editor at The New York Times and the author, most recently, of The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act.

Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game

The difference between scholarship and wisdom

by Clay Risen | Monday, November 09, 2015

Lithium, Water, and Suicide

by Clay Risen | Thursday, June 27, 2013

Spies Among Us

Military snooping on civilians, which escalated in the turbulent '60s, never entirely went away and is back again on a much larger scale

by Clay Risen | Monday, December 01, 2008

Newsletter

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

Remembering W. S. Merwin

by John Kaag

W. S. Merwin, one of the most celebrated and prolific poets of his generation, died last Friday at the age of 91. A former U.S. poet laureate and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Merwin was also known for his work as a conservationist. After moving to Hawaii in the 1970s, he began the decades-long project of restoring different plant species to the former pineapple plantation where he lived. Merwin was notoriously difficult to contact, but in the fall of last year, John Kaag managed to interview him over the phone. Merwin, he reports, repeated the same lines throughout their conversation: “The time of wisdom cannot be measured, and, for me, wisdom is the garden. There is no time in the garden.” In an essay for the Scholar, Kaag explores this relationship between gardening and the passage of time, and how it is reflected in Merwin’s life and poetry.