One Mind Humming
If pain isn’t in our head, then where is it? In our June 23 issue, Laura Kolbe, a physician, clinical ethicist, and poet, reviews three new...
Spiritual Exercises
When she was six years old, the cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel accompanied her parents and brother on a two-week trip to Europe. There, she...
Kings of the Universe
In a curious passage of his Histories, the Greek writer Herodotus describes an otherwise unknown (and possibly mythical) water-hoarding system used by the Persians, the imperial...
Flaubert’s Planet
Studies of literature don’t usually begin by pronouncing a large swath of it to be a failure. But this was Amitav Ghosh’s point, right out of...
The Master of Blame
In 1973 my professor at the University of Bordeaux assigned Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932)...
Memory Wars in Latvia
Riga, with its well-preserved medieval center and art nouveau district, has long been known as the Pearl of the Baltics. Thirty years after the restoration of...
Meridian Response
The nearly audible click of snow on snow, clickof eye contact, tinglingin the scalp that movesslowly down the neck, soundheated until it changes state, tenseliquid in the mouth,...
Wielding Wheat
“I have not felt so much at home for a long time,” wrote Mark Twain of arriving in Odessa in 1867. It was a curious sentiment....
The White People in My Blood
What do I know about the whitePeople I don’t know in my bloodDoes their blood pale my father’s whereIt meets his blood Where in my body...
Diary of an Adducer
Who is the titular fool of Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot? It’s plainly Selin, the heroine, a goofy kid from New Jersey with a hyperactive...
