The Toll of the Clock
Time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see...
Hemingway’s Consolations
1. “Hemingway will be the best known of you all,” the Parisian bookseller Adrienne Monnier told a gathering of mostly Anglophone writers and literary people in...
The Ballad of Ban the Bomb
He wanted to meet as soon as possible,Desperately wanted me to collaborate with him to fulfillA years-overdue commission he had from the State of Israel.He had...
Conceiving the Future
In 1969, a year after Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a book predicting that a “population bomb” would set humankind on a path to widespread famine...
Stalin’s Lawyers at Nuremberg
It was surely a sign that the rule of law was finding its way into international relations when, after a world war of unmatched brutality during...
Ashbery’s Cliffhangers
When we say that a poem is “good”—not with the dubious implication that it’s not great but with genuine satisfaction—are we unconsciously echoing Genesis, “And God...
Designs for Living
The Memorial to the Fallen of the Lješanska Nahija Region, designed by Svetlana Kana Radević, stands on a small hill in Barutana, Montenegro. Concrete tendrils rise...
Whose Freedom?
Last fall the student council at the University of Wisconsin unanimously voted to demand the removal of a statue of Abraham Lincoln from the campus, on...
Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life
Early in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For Helen, the flighty younger sister,...
A Work in Progress
Has the meaning of feminism ever been more jumbled than it is today? Any woman speaking up or talking back, whether about work, sex, criticism, culture,...
