Ten Years After Occupy
On September 16, 2021, we published Molly Crabapple’s essay “Occupy Memory,” a personal reminiscence about the movement that began—exactly ten years ago—with a protest gathering in...
Dickens’s Multitudes
Charles Dickens was a great coiner of words—over four hundred, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—but “monopolylogue” was not among them. Credit for that particular invention...
The Glories of Aksum
In the past thirty years a scholarly revolution has altered our notion of the first thousand years of Christianity. We no longer see it as an...
Rolling Along
I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation...
The Escape Artist
Even among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case. The architect of...
Our Silent Partners
Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about...
On the Road
On March 17, 1709, Antoine Galland, the French translator of The Thousand and One Nights, wrote in his diary of meeting in Paris a certain “Hanna,”...
The Uses of Portraiture
It is hard, looking at the young Alessandro de’ Medici in Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting of 1534–1535, not to empathize. Long-nosed and tender-eyed, he has a...
Where Sheep May Safely Graze
What to Look For in Spring,…Summer,…Autumn, and…Winter are four small books published in the early 1960s by Ladybird, a legendary British children’s publisher. The charmingly eccentric...
Mogul of Mystery
Over the past two years—since the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in July 2019 on charges of trafficking minors and then his suicide in prison; Prince Andrew’s...
