August 2019

A month before Woodstock 50 was announced, the festival was already in deep trouble...

Back when Gibson was growing up, in the 1930s and 1940s, it would have been a hive of activity, shrieking kids running around playing stickball, punchball, marbles and a variety of tag games. And as fate had it, there was another activity taking place on the doorstep of her...

it was an often deplored “fact” among German enthusiasts of colonialism that too few of their compatriots were thoroughly interested in the colonies.

The U.S. now has two coal-burning power plants that avoid dumping carbon dioxide into the air.

What I cherish most about Toni Morrison’s work is the way that she used the English language: to its fullest, across its entire range.

What binds Hongkongers as a human collective to speak truth to power? Generations have experienced Hong Kong as a land of opportunities and refuge.

In an unsettled world, amid violent wars and imperial occupations, with all norms ruthlessly cast aside, did Kashmir really have a chance to be free?

If I could walk, I would go to the streets again”, Muna*, a 25-year-old Sudanese protester, told me over the phone recently. She was shot and severely injured by the army...

Existentialism has a reputation for being angst-ridden and gloomy mostly because of its emphasis on pondering the meaninglessness of existence, but two of the best-known existentialists knew how to have fun in the face of absurdity.

Whoever decided to keep the most art per square mile anywhere in the world below sea level had a singular faith in human civilization...

In Kwon’s novel, this line is overheard by Will as he observes the young woman of his obsession—Phoebe—drift slowly into the orbit of cultist John Leal.

Two books about solitary poets travelling the Mediterranean and writing poems came my way within a relatively short period of time; it made sense to treat them within the same space.

In his only novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2004, Boris Johnson uses a strange word. The hero, like Johnson himself at the time, is a backbench Conservative member of the House of Commons.

Narrative is a strange thing, that little circumscribed universe bound between the covers of a book. Unlike life, a novel actually draws to a close.