Something about poetry—writing it, reading it, writing about reading it—begs to be postponed indefinitely. I don’t mean that I dread it, only that it calls for conditions that never quite…

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The death of the mythical method

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No one can torch the English language like a Beltway insider. A few years ago, phrases like “a feature, not a bug” and “saying the quiet part out loud” burned…

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On Eliot Weinberger

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I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking…

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On Kafka

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Because I’ve written about government conspiracies, I sometimes hear from crazy people. “Only the intervention of AI can stop Man from creating Hell cybernetically,” one wrote recently. “It would be…

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When Guatemalan adoption became big business

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I was six the first time I recall setting foot in a funeral home, and I remember my confusion at the phrase—a home where none but the dead lived, and…

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Billie Holiday’s changeable shade

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Carrie Sun used to be on the side of Big Money. Her memoir, Private Equity (Penguin Press, $29), describes her disillusioning tenure as an assistant to Boone Prescott, the founder…

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The elusive fiction of Phyllis Paul

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The Wa State is an autonomous zone nestled in the highlands of Myanmar bordering China and Thailand. You won’t find it on United Nations maps, but it’s about the size…

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On Mary Beard’s lives of the Caesars

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On the enduring legacy of Marshal Pétain

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On May 21, 1991, in the third-floor men’s room at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a student noticed a hand dangling beneath one of the partitions, already turning blue.…

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The grand, gruesome theories of René Girard

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Did you get this message?, by Esther Pearl Watson © The artist. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles So you’ve seen a UFO—great! May I suggest keeping a lid on it? The…

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On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonality

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A few years ago I found myself close to an episode of tabloid intrigue. A friend’s uncle was accused of murdering his wife in a rich Connecticut town. He attempted suicide…

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On Zadie Smith and the Gen X novel

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Colson Whitehead’s half-true Harlem

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A revisionist view of the drug wars

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Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite.…

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Human Lock, by Vojtěch Kovařík. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, Brussels, New York City The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos (New Directions, $25.95), refers…

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On Chuck Berry

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