Goodbye, Hello

As this book is a travel guide, we may reasonably ask whether it is useful beyond that specific purpose. What does it offer scholars of urban history, or for that matter scholars in general who may or may not be planning trips to Prague?

Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg.

To my surprise, in the car the other day my math-obsessed 14-year-old son Dylan suddenly exclaimed “John Ashbery!” from the backseat. It turns out he’d reached the last pages of Jordan Ellenberg's...

Bar Dykes—a forgotten gem written in the early 1980s by Tennessee-based author (and proud butch) Merril Mushroom—is being presented by The Other Side of Silence

I’m a crier by nature, but as I have aged, my reasons for tearing up have become more elusive, even to me. Where once I could predict a crying spell, like spotting an East Texas thunderstorm moving across the landscape...

Our culture has always had ambiguous feelings about the moon; both the celestial orb that lights our way home and a furnace of madness that causes lycanthropy and marks the witches’ sabbath.

by Nicholas Rombes From Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Simon and Schuster, 2018: The effect, on Alice, was dazzling and demoralizing all at once: reverberating in her sternum, the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something...

Part of running for President is the contest to tell the best story about the problems of the country.

In high school, we swooned to boy bands and carried quarters so we could “arrive alive” after a teenage drinking binge. In middle school, we walked straight to airport gates to greet our grandparents as they tumbled off flights...

Hung in my room, in such a manner as to catch my eye on waking, is an excellent photograph of Bellini's St. Jerome in his Study. I am aware that it is not at all by Bellini

Thanks to Instagram and all its metastasized relations, nowhere is so far off the beaten path we can’t experience it visually...

The Siege of Havana, 1762, Dominic Serres the Elder, 1767 by Ernesto Bassi The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, by Elena Andrea Schneider,  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 360 pp. On a Sunday morning in early June 1762, Cuba’s captain general,...

I first read Under Western Eyes as a graduate student in English at Penn State University in a terrible seminar called simply “Woolf and Conrad”...

After watching the first Democratic debates, from which this party will nominate its candidate for President of the United States, I was happily unnerved...

At the eastern edge of the city of Pittsburgh, where neighborhoods lined with red and pin oak, birch and elm start to merge into the forested thicket...

When, according to Socrates, was Mladić more miserable? When he committed genocide and over a long period of time was not arrested, convicted, or punished..

Sexual and gender-based violence in war doesn't stop when peace comes.

Delhi—In early April, a fire began to smolder inside the Ghazipur landfill, the trash mountain that stands like a brown, stinking sentinel, two hundred feet high, on the outskirts of New Delhi...

What is your favourite lost poem? There’s a lot of material (not) out there to choose from, from the lost plays of Aeschylus to the discarded hospital poems of Anne Sexton and Ivan Blatný.

Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor...