Apropos of Nothing
Bertrand Russell’s 1951 obituary for Ludwig Wittgenstein is only a few paragraphs long, and the second consists largely of a single pointed anecdote: Quite at first...
The Lady Vanishes
The original title of María Gainza’s second novel, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, fluently translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, is La luz negra. “La...
The Enigma of Nonarrival
In the dream of Caribbean migration in the 1950s from the British colonies to the so-called Mother Country, four thousand miles away, the travelers always promised...
‘She’s Capital!’
When we meet her in Revelations 17, “the great whore” whose name is “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,”...
A Painful In-Betweenness
Over five million Ukrainians have fled their country since Russia launched its invasion on February 24. This staggering tide, almost entirely women and children, may soon...
Condemned to Life
This mesmerizing oddity opens with a prefatory couple of pages about something—some sort of memoir or testimony—that the narrator has just finished writing: I was gradually...
Crude Reality
Thirty years ago, in a review of Cities of Salt and The Trench, two novels by the Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif, Amitav Ghosh lamented the dearth...
Free Markets, Besieged Citizens
Beginning with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a succession of Democratic presidents joined Republicans in turning away from the New Deal model of regulated capitalism toward...
The Forest’s-Eye View
Where I live is edged to the south by a treeline: red maple, sugar maple, red oak, white pine, two kinds of hickory. Beyond the treeline...
Turns Out Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy Was Built on a Very Familiar Planet
The more we get to learn about the future of the Force in a post Return of the Jedi, post Rise of Skywalker era for Star...
