‘The Spoils of a Savage War’
The French writer David Diop manages to recount a war he never experienced with the intimacy of a witness. A historian at the University of Pau,...
New England Ecstasies
In 1840 a slightly bewildered and grumpy John Quincy Adams observed in his diary that a young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, “after failing in the...
The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been...
Uncertain in Love
To the Editors: Responding to a critique as condescending as the one penned by Anahid Nersessian about my book The End of Love is a challenging...
Queer Poetry for Every Sign
Poetry and astrology are both tools that can help us understand our lives. Astrology gives us a framework to better see ourselves and locate our gifts....
How Nudity Both Reveals and Conceals
When the narrator of White on White arrives at the apartment, they assume that they will have the rooms to themselves, a beautiful light-filled place to...
How Much Does Annotating Help You Remember What You Read?
I, like most of you I’m sure, associate annotation with school. You might think of studying in the lecture hall, late-night cram sessions, or reading and...
Enter the Time Machine With These Books About Precolonial Life
As a kid in school, I found it easy to visualise the recent past, because so much of it was around me. The General Post Office...
How Are South Asian Works of Translation Amplifying the Voices of the Marginalized?
The marginalized exist on the fringes of society. Which is to say, their voices are omitted by white man’s literature. Most of our academic textbooks never...
