Essays

Exhortation [ssa_access]

Getting It All Wrong

The proponents of Theory and Cultural Critique could learn a thing or two from bioculture

Essays [ssa_access]

Lincoln the Persuader

Seeking to get people behind his policies, he made himself the best writer for all our presidents

Essays [ssa_access]

The Man Who Loved Languages

A scholar with the ability and audacity to rebuild the Tower of Babel died a year ago, but his controversial project lives on

Essays [ssa_access]

My Mother’s Body

Just remembering her is not enough; resurrecting her is the ultimate goal

Essays [ssa_access]

Tomorrow Is Another Day

An Ethiopian student survives a brutal imprisonment by translating Gone with the Wind into his native tongue

Essays [ssa_access]

Saratoga Bill

He bet cautiously at the track, but elsewhere he was drawn to those with the odds stacked against them

Findings [ssa_access]

Bearing Gifts

Essays [ssa_access]

The Ordinariness of AIDS

Can a disease that tells us so much about ourselves ever be anything but extraordinary?

Essays [ssa_access]

The Sack of Baghdad

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned cultural icons into loot and archaeological sites into ruins

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

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