Mutability and Mortality
Perhaps my favorite in this set of personal homages is “Ode to the Arts and Humanities Staff” which sings the praises of the otherwise unseen and unsung heroes, the clerical and support staffs that keep universities and academic departments running.
Translating the Chinese Diaspora
For many of the characters in Yan’s stories, particularly those who find themselves alone in a foreign land, the feeling of always wishing to be elsewhere captures a state of longing that appears to be the most permanent fixture of their interrupted lives.
The Resurrection of a Language and the Language of Resurrection
Lewis Glinert observes that “an Israeli teenager today can open a three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided… By contrast, no English speaker today could open a one-thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it unaided; it’s another tongue.”
Interwoven Fates: 20th-Century German History and the European Refugee Crisis
Erpenbeck’s language is measured and restrained, devoid of preachiness; she writes primarily in the present tense, leading her readers to comprehend the complexities of history and fate, without succumbing to emotion.
The Americans and the Nazis: Who Copied Whom?
The sources make clear that two distinct strands of American law, the second class (Jim Crow) citizenship imposed on African-Americans in the South and the exclusionary rules applied to nonwhites in American immigration law, were known to the Germans and directly influenced the drafting process.
Originalism Then and Now
Neither recourse to illusory historical specificity, nor ex cathedra decrees from five of nine Justices, can in the long run substitute for self-governing citizens and legislators who accept the responsibility of deliberating and compromising with one another.
Treasures Better Hid: The Making of Our High-Energy World
By the early nineteenth century, the power potential of the pre-industrial world was just about maxed out. It was a world powered by animal muscles, windmills, and water wheels. And it was a wood-powered world with rapidly disappearing forests.
Epistolary Exposure, Embodied Critique, and American Identity: On Bruce Springsteen’s “The Hitter”
One of the ingenious choices on Nebraska is the recurrent trope of the songs’ narrators deferentially or defensively inserting the word “sir” into their issuances of direct address. This is inverted in “The Hitter” where the address is epistolary, a man writing to his mother with the recurrence coming in repeated uses of the word “Ma.”
A Small Revolution Within a Larger One
Toews’s brave humor, which has added grace and depth to such weighty topics as suicide in the past, is still present, chiefly in the irony of a male narrator, August Epps, who must take notes on the women’s meeting because they are unable to read and write, having lived in a religious community that does not allow them to.
Dealing Beautifully With the Ordinary
The comedian is an anti-Romantic: Wherever he steps foot, following in the steps of romantic tourists with their love of the exotic, whether artificial and pre-modern (Europe) or wildly natural (Alaska, safaris), he dispels their illusions.
History in Light and Shadow
“Lumière Mystérieuse: Soane and the Architecture of Light,” at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, examines Soane’s innovative use of light as a design material as integral as bricks and mortar.
Not the Good Guys
Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood doesn’t present Dalton and Booth as heroes. They’re by turns endearing, ridiculous, and contemptible. But they do the only admirable things in the story.
The Cerebral and the Sensual in Equipoise
Arp, like Guggenheim, straddled multiple worlds. He was born in Strasbourg, which is one of Europe’s oddest cities.
Christian Dior and the Aesthetics of Femininity
In 1947, Christian Dior unwittingly prompted a transcontinental reappraisal of the relationships of femininity and culture: were women to be muses, icons, agents, or all three?
Archaeology’s Heroic Age
New Yorker John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood were classic nineteenth-century adventurers, immortalized for revealing the glories of ancient Maya civilization to an astonished world.
Humanity’s Most Beautiful Problem
Color makes our lives more vivid, more beautiful. But it also hides ugly truths.
A Group, a Sound and an Era
After reading Go Ahead in the Rain, I hope that Hanif Abdurraqib is not the last person to choose a deep and abiding love for the music that makes us real to one another.
