October 31, 2023
Owen Davies— As cheap printed magic books swirled around the world, in late 19th-century Britain a small group of middle-class men and women created a new secret, magic movement in… READ MORE
October 18, 2023
Francine Prose — If we view Cleopatra through any lens except that of her appearance, her seductiveness, her sexual agency, and her relationships with two men, we see a brave… READ MORE
October 11, 2023
Carlos Eire — Levitating saints raise questions that no historian should avoid. Never mind the metaphysical questions, that floating ten-ton anvil that historians dare not touch, much less acknowledge. Aside… READ MORE
September 22, 2023
Leo Damrosch— Everyone knows that Casanova was a seducer. He belongs to that rare company of mortals whose personal names have floated free from history, and we know what a… READ MORE
August 25, 2023
Carl Phillips— When I was ten, I wanted to learn to play the clarinet and eventually join the school band. But (or And, or So—) my father found an affordable,… READ MORE
August 10, 2023
Nelly Lahoud— Within less than two years of conceiving the idea, Usama put it into action. On September 11, 2001, and on Usama’s orders, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes,… READ MORE
July 11, 2023
The new edition of The Artist’s Reality, Mark Rothko’s revered book on artistic practice and philosophy, features an afterword written for this occasion by artist and award-winning author Makoto Fujimura, whose own… READ MORE
June 29, 2023
Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken’s Crush is a powerful collection of poems driven… READ MORE
June 23, 2023
In The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity, Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau present a… READ MORE
June 22, 2023
Erwin Chemerinsky— One more example—a particularly powerful one of originalists abandoning originalism when it does not serve their ideological goals—is affirmative action. The originalists who have been on the Court,… READ MORE
A Conversation with Trudier Harris on Bigger: A Literary Life