By Jeff Dolven, from A New English Grammar, a collection in progress. Dolven, who received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of Speculative Music, published by Sarabande in 2013.
These are tough times for parents. Not because child rearing has gotten any harder — it’s the same as it ever was — but because we are newly overrich in hand-wringing books…
I never wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be a person. My identity crisis began at age three, when I wanted to be Popeye but realized that I…
Flannery O’Connor: No children. Eudora Welty: No children. One children’s book. Katherine Anne Porter: No children, many miscarriages. Hilary Mantel, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Jane Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop,…
Soon after my book Bringing Up Bébé appeared, in 2012, I discovered an animated video made by a company in Taiwan. In it, a woman who’s supposed to be me…
It was summer and I was a new father, to eight-month-old daughters. I was the pilot of a car trip: New York City to somewhere near Lake Michigan — a…
The hospital room in which I recovered from my caesarean section was as cold and ugly as any hospital room anywhere, but because it was high on a hill in…
It might be necessary to work backward from tool marks and defects in the material on which the sky is painted, inspect the hinges joining the sky’s three panels, yet…
In my mid-forties, I married a man who had joint custody of two children, both boys, from a previous marriage. The boys, Jed and Jason, were nineteen and fifteen. Not…
The world into which I was born no longer exists, of course. I’ve been around for almost half a century, so it was inevitable. My parents — one French, raised…
Percentage change since 2009 in the number of Americans who play football : –17 Who play rugby : +77 Factor by which female college soccer players are more likely than male players to suffer…
By Mario Vargas Llosa, from Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society, out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vargas Llosa, who is the author…
From descriptions of sex-tracking apps included in “Quantified Sex,” an article by Deborah Lupton, an Australian sociologist, that was published in the April 2015 issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality.