Interviews

Francesca Lessa
The Pact That Terrorized a Continent: Francesca Lessa on the Hidden Machinery of Operation Condor
On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier climbed into his car on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., and began his commute to work. He was a former Chilean... Read more...
Katherine Bucknell
Coming Into Focus: Katherine Bucknell on the Many Lives of Christopher Isherwood
In January 1939, a young English writer boarded a ship in Southampton bound for New York alongside his friend W. H. Auden, and never really went home again. Christopher Isherwood... Read more...
Richard Polt
The Question Remains: Richard Polt on Thinking, Technology, and the Shadow of Martin Heidegger
Why is there something rather than nothing? It is the oldest question in philosophy, and one that most thinkers eventually set aside and move on from. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) never... Read more...
Aubrey Malone
Between Norma and Marilyn: Aubrey Malone Opens the Final Curtain on Marilyn Monroe
In the early 1950s, a photographer named Eve Arnold arrived on a film set to shoot a young actress between takes and found her sitting alone in a corner, reading.... Read more...
Bread, Bombs, and Memory: Abdalhadi Alijla’s Reckoning with Gaza
Bread, Bombs, and Memory: Abdalhadi Alijla’s Reckoning with Gaza
There is a moment in Fearful in Gaza when Abdalhadi Alijla describes his mother reading stories by candlelight during a power outage, her voice steady, her children gathered close while the... Read more...
James L. W. West III
The Beautiful and Damned (Text): How James L. W. West III is Preserving Fitzgerald’s Legacy
In the spring of 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald took his family to the French Riviera, rented a villa, and wrote The Great Gatsby in a sustained burst of concentration that he... Read more...
Matthew Shipe
Reading Roth, Recklessly: Matthew Shipe on Sex, Politics, and the Literary Legacy of Philip Roth
In 1969, Philip Roth's publisher received a letter from a rabbi in New Jersey demanding that Portnoy's Complaint be withdrawn from sale. It was one of thousands. The novel, narrated by... Read more...
Allan Janik
The Jewish Philosopher Hitler Loved: Allan Janik Untangles the Otto Weininger Paradox
On the morning of October 4, 1903, a twenty-three-year-old Viennese philosopher named Otto Weininger rented a room in the house in Vienna's Schwarzspanierstrasse where Ludwig van Beethoven had died, and... Read more...
Calculated Risks: Cheryl Misak on the Life and Mind of Frank Ramsey
Calculated Risks: Cheryl Misak on the Life and Mind of Frank Ramsey
In January 1930, a 26-year-old Cambridge don was admitted to Guy's Hospital in London following complications from jaundice and died within weeks of an operation whose exact nature has never... Read more...
Catching the Butterfly: Dana Dragunoiu on the Elusive Vladimir Nabokov
Catching the Butterfly: Dana Dragunoiu on the Elusive Vladimir Nabokov
In the summer of 1958, a novel that had been rejected by four American publishers and quietly printed in Paris by a press better known for pornography arrived in the... Read more...
The Heretic of Logic: James R. Meyer on Why Gödel, Searle, and Math’s Sacred Cows Don’t Hold Up
The Heretic of Logic: James R. Meyer on Why Gödel, Searle, and Math’s Sacred Cows Don’t Hold Up
In 1930, at a philosophy conference in Königsberg, a young Kurt Gödel waited quietly for his moment to speak. The gathering had been convened to celebrate the triumph of formal... Read more...
David Schwartz
Was Enrico Fermi Really the Last Man Who Knew Everything? David Schwartz Investigates
On the afternoon of December 2, 1942, a group of scientists gathered beneath the stands of a disused squash court at the University of Chicago and waited. They were standing... Read more...