Despair Archives

Despair

Redeeming Time

From Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, a book co-written with Stephen Greenblatt, which will be published next month by Yale University Press. The idea of the second chance is one…

Unending Struggle

by Thomas Chatterton Williams,

In 1974, a pair of scientists who would go on to win the Nobel Prize published a paper demonstrating that the chlorofluorocarbons used in aerosol sprays and refrigerators were harming…

State of the Art

by Greg Jackson,

From “Sources of Life,” which was published in the Spring 2021 issue of The Point. Jackson’s essay “Prayer for a Just War” appeared in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine.…

A Model Married Man

by George Frost Kennan,

From a 1933 diary entry by George Kennan (1904–2005), with the heading “January, Riga.” Kennan was working for the State Department at the time, in a diplomatic post in Latvia.…