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February 21, 2019
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A blog about the New York literary life by Phillip Lopate, celebrated essayist, director of Columbia University’s nonfiction program, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, and author of Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and To Show and to Tell, among other books.

Previous posts

Tennis, Anyone?

Obsession and regression

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, June 30, 2017

Memories of Jazz Nights

You needed stamina, but the payoff was great

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, June 23, 2017

Valentines Past

If only I’d had the nerve …

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, June 16, 2017

On the Death of Friendship

Nothing lasts forever

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, June 02, 2017

On Keeping a Blog

A Farewell

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, May 26, 2017

A Visit to Harvard

And a surprise encounter with Dr. Johnson

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, May 19, 2017

Remembering Cynthia Macdonald

Poet, teacher, opera singer, psychoanalyst, and friend

by Phillip Lopate | Thursday, May 11, 2017

Marrying a Widow

Or, my spectral predecessor

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, May 05, 2017

Baldwin the Prophet vs. Baldwin the Writer

Can a film really capture the essence of both?

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, April 28, 2017

Listening to Dinah

The complexity of “Don’t Explain”

by Phillip Lopate | Friday, April 21, 2017
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Newsletter

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

School Survival

by Anne P. Beatty

As L.A. teachers prepare to go on strike, we’re revisiting an essay by Anne P. Beatty about her time teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles, where her homeroom class often paused for a moment of silence to mourn students who had died in drive-by shootings. Her students knew that this was not the case in wealthier school districts. “They knew that somewhere there were schools with computers that worked, just as they knew that somewhere it was safe to walk through the streets at night,” Beatty writes. “They knew it wasn’t normal for 16-year-olds to die.” But what she found shocking, her students had to learn to endure. “Apathy was involved in giving in to the violence, and there was despair over the prospect of a better future.”