Blog

Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann and the Seductions of Decadence
He was the high priest of European culture who chronicled its decline with such elegance that the end often looked more beautiful than the beginning. In 1933, Thomas Mann was... Read more...
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy: The Man Who Won’t Let the Occupation Be Occupied Territory
He was supposed to cover “the territories.” Somewhere along the way, the territories started covering him. Every week, while most Israelis encountered the West Bank through security briefings and blurred... Read more...
Penguin Books
The Sixpence That Changed Publishing Forever
In 1935, a man stood on an English railway platform with nothing to read. The newsstand offered the usual fare: newspapers, magazines, pulp. Good books existed, but they were expensive,... Read more...
James Joyce with his publisher Sylvia Beach in her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, 1922.
The Book That Had to Go on Trial
How Ulysses transformed censorship law and redefined what publishers could print In December 1933, a federal judge in New York was asked to rule on a question that courts had... Read more...
Fernando Pessoa and the Crowd in His Head
Fernando Pessoa and the Crowd in His Head
He made inner confusion sound orderly, and in doing so made ordinary life feel metaphysically unstable. In Lisbon in the early decades of the 20th century, a bespectacled office worker... Read more...
Israel Palestine
The Skeptic Who Stopped Asking: Sam Harris and the Seduction of Moral Certainty
In response to Sam Harris's recent Substack essay, "Why I Won't Debate Critics of Israel" On September 16, 1982, residents of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila woke... Read more...
Why Bookstores Get to Send Books Back
Why Bookstores Get to Send Books Back
Picture a clothing shop sending unsold sweaters back to the manufacturer months later for a full refund. Or a supermarket returning stale cereal for cash. No retailer gets that deal,... Read more...
Saul Bellow
Bellow at Full Volume
He was the novelist who gave voice to the modern mind at full volume—neurotic, erudite, self-lacerating, and insistently alive. Saul Bellow carved a singular path through 20th-century American fiction. While... Read more...
Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti Understood What the Powerful Fear Most
In 1972, a thirty-eight-year-old political scientist named Michael Parenti stood before a congressional subcommittee and told its members, plainly and without diplomatic softening, that American democracy was functioning more or... Read more...
Gwendolyn Brooks and the Music of Ordinary Lives
Gwendolyn Brooks and the Music of Ordinary Lives
She made back porches sound like battlefields, and in doing so, turned the Black everyday into an American epic. Gwendolyn Brooks did not have to go far to find her... Read more...
Missing, but Not Forgotten: Charles Horman, Operation Condor, and America’s Hidden History
Missing, but Not Forgotten: Charles Horman, Operation Condor, and America’s Hidden History
On a warm September day in 1973, an American journalist named Charles Horman sat in a modest Santiago pension, taking notes on a country sliding into darkness. Within days, he... Read more...
Kindle
The Kindle's quiet revolution
When Amazon released its first e-reader in 2007, few mistook it for a cultural watershed. The device was ungainly, its screen gray and slow to refresh. It looked less like... Read more...