O ne night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

T he only thing everyone can agree on about why Donald Trump does what he does is that his reasons are not obvious. There are innumerable proposals on offer for an intellectual framework that ...

What I’ve been discussing is the how of writing a story that requires some degree of transcendence: how you go about bridging the gap between what you know and what you don’t and sometimes can’t.But ...

In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that ...

Discussed in this essay: Airless Spaces, by Shulamith Firestone.Semiotext(e). 232 pages. $17.95. Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender ...

Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed ...

On minor characters and human possibility. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with ...

Does anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll ...

The two Fellini pictures that affected me the most, the ones that really marked me, were I Vitelloni and 8½.I Vitelloni because it captured something so real and so precious that related directly to ...

As good as it might look, this lyrical burst is almost entirely collage. “Such join’d” is the start of the third line in the original, and the poem is from then on interspersed with repetitions of the ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

Edmund Wilson’s bravura narrative of the history of socialism, To the Finland Station, begins, rather surprisingly, with a reflection on Vico. “It is strange and stirring,” Wilson writes, “to find in ...