Blog

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...
Marjane Satrapi, Whose Iran Defied American and Israeli Narratives, Dies at 56
Marjane Satrapi, Whose Iran Defied American and Israeli Narratives, Dies at 56
In one of the most indelible scenes from Persepolis, a young Marjane sits in her bedroom, convinced she will be the last prophet. She speaks to God with the seriousness of... Read more...
Marilyn Monroe
Keeping Marilyn in Mind: A Hundred Years of a Woman the World Can’t Forget
On a gray January afternoon in 1955, a secretary at the Actors Studio on West 44th Street in Manhattan looked up to see a familiar face—too familiar, in fact, for... Read more...
Why publishers keep chasing the “next Harry Potter”
Why publishers keep chasing the “next Harry Potter”
In the spring of 1997, Bloomsbury Publishing released a children's novel by an unknown author, printed in a run of five hundred copies, several dozen of which were sent to... Read more...
5 Books That Prove Ernest Hemingway Is the Master of Short Sentences and Long Shadows
5 Books That Prove Ernest Hemingway Is the Master of Short Sentences and Long Shadows
Ernest Hemingway’s legend can get in the way of his sentences. The boats, bullfights, bars, and bravado are easy to caricature; the actual prose is harder to dismiss: lean but... Read more...