Originalism’s Charade
The Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 to overrule Roe v. Wade and erase the constitutional right to abortion was the culmination of a half-century-long campaign...
Clay Genius
In my cabinet I have a cream-colored soup plate, purchased in the early 1990s at an antique store in Greenwich Village. For me it was rather...
Empty Spaces
There are empty spaces we makeand empty spaces we grow accustomed to, as though they were alwaysthere—a gold mine you can descend an hour into by...
A Vivisectional Style
John Donne was a contemporary of Shakespeare. This is strangely difficult to remember, for they had contrary relationships to poetic traditions and trends. Like other English...
The Cruelties of Empire
In the heyday of colonialism decades ago, when the British Empire controlled so much of the world, it was tempting to think of it as more...
Between Abstraction and Representation
In the past quarter-century a great debate that dominated the visual arts for a hundred years has faded, but without a conclusion. On one side were...
Resurrecting the Poets of Tbilisi
John Steinbeck traveled to Soviet Georgia in 1947 and marveled afterward that Georgian poetry was read there “by everyone,” that Georgian poets “were buried on an...
Accounting for the Human Cost
How should the United States be dealing with inflation? For many decades, economists have given a straightforward answer: the Federal Reserve Board should increase interest rates...
Holding a Gun
In the spring of 2017 I met Reginald Dwayne Betts. I began to read his poetry, his memoir of how he became a poet in prison,...
