On Jon Meacham

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Spreading Fires During the Great Kanto Earthquake, a newspaper illustration of the 1855 earthquake in Edo, Japan. Courtesy Special Collections, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library A metropolis can transform, and even…

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Wordsworth at 250

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Tracing the origins of the German nation

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Discussed in this essay: Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris; Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses; Elizabeth DiSavino’s Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector; Percival Everett’s Telephone over chess.…

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Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

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On Jacques Tati

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Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at an annual gathering, 1928 Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Last summer, Philadelphia proclaimed…

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On the long shadow of Maoism

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The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist

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The first history of the most remote ocean

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Design for a grotesque mask by Johann Ulrich Stapf © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Witch hunts have always been a tool of those in power. As such, they shed…

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The life of Robert Stone

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There’s much to be said for being maladjusted. More and more, perhaps, as the environment to which one is expected to adjust becomes more ruinous. The climate activist Greta Thunberg…

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The end of a literary marriage

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On the specious new history podcasts

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On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti

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On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés

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Discussed in this essay: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 240 pages. $26. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, by Vincent Brown. Harvard University Press. 336 pages. $35.  Of…

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  Questions about the future of Islam in Europe tend to revolve around “Europeans,” reflexively imagined as native-born and white. If reactionary nationalists fear the influence of an “alien” culture,…

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Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race

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A gothic life of Frank Lloyd Wright

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On the morning of my friend’s funeral, my period arrived two weeks early and with a sudden force that ruined the black clothing I’d brought and the rickety chair I…

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The gospel according to John (and Karen)

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America’s new poetry of place

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There are no men in the densely civilized galaxy of Samuel R. Delany’s 1984 novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Everybody—whether human or extraterrestrial, and on all but…

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Ben Lerner changes perspective

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On Henrik Ibsen

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