The lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, ‘What are you going ...

The office administrator would have thought I’d lost my mind if I’d turned in all those receipts. I hid them from her and ...

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light ...

May 21, 2025 – "I want to talk about Valencia’s achievement in transmitting the conjoined rush of being young, being high, ...

The science behind burn-in is grotesque: picture swarms of electrons like locusts flinging themselves at the thin phosphor ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the ...

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s ...

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be ...