November 2020

Every year around the holidays my wife and I used to watch a feature-length cartoon called Yogi’s First Christmas. We had recorded it on a video...

On August 30, 1939, Franciszek Honiok, a Pole living in the village of Hohenlieben in what was then the German province of Silesia, was picked up...

In periods of collapse, we’re compelled to do things differently as old ways become untenable. We’ve entered the planetary-tantrum phase of climate change, and fossil fuels...

Not all liberations are complete. For the Korean peninsula, the end of World War II brought freedom from Japan’s colonial rule, but it also sliced the...

Well, it was just as I thought, the path all but obliterated— We had moved then from the first to the second stage, from the dream...

The novels of the English experimentalist Ann Quin are not like most: although she was loosely affiliated with a movement of pioneering British writers in the...

The daughter lives in a large stone house on an island off the coast of Brittany, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think of her as...

Richard Taruskin must surely be our most ferociously adversarial writer on music. He has read everything, he argues with everyone, he sets out his views with...

There are no bacon strips this morning so a mouse ponders a pound of sugar. A mouse wants what a mouse wants, salt-cured pork instead of...

At CalArts in the 1970s I once had a seminar with the poet and maverick art critic David Antin. The dean introduced him at the first...