Books, Arts, and Culture

At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was...

I intended this essay, successively, to coincide with various recent events: the death of a president, the launch of a book, the anniversary of a revolution....

In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou...

About two thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice, just as Elizabeth Bennet has begun to conquer her bias against the arrogant Mr. Darcy, and...

In 1863 the biologist T.H. Huxley proposed an African origin for humanity. Known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his ferocious defense of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, he had...

Kazuo Ishiguro was a social worker before he was a novelist. Between 1979 and 1982, he worked at West London Cyrenians, a charity that provided support...

In the middle of a gusty October three years ago, The New York Times published an obituary under the headline “Sue Hubbell, Who Wrote of Bees...

“Among Finnish peoples,” I read with close attention at age eleven in the impressively weighty Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, magic made its influence felt throughout all...

In December 1905 Richard Strauss’s opera Salome—blasphemous and obscene in its libretto, fiercely dissonant in its music—had its scandalous premiere in Dresden, and Franz Lehár’s operetta...