Little Emperor of Solstice
Doing this and that, further shredded by ribbonsI’m your inner child from beforethe procedure of ambition I ran the neighborhood on training wheelsHeavy rubberized pastel flowed...
Disaster Was Her Element
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure…. I will not have earned death. —Jean Rhys There isn’t an...
Their Glorious Façades
Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People is set during the inexhaustibly fascinating few years preceding its original publication in 1971, in the city of Los Angeles, where...
The Complicity of the Textbooks
Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most...
These Disunited States
The Ukraine war and global economic troubles momentarily overshadowed domestic discord in the United States earlier this year, but it didn’t go away. The groundless insistence...
Brick, Mortar, and Rot
Stability is to the Spanish what freedom is to Americans. (This is a stereotype, but life abroad inures you to stereotypes you may have rejected as...
Family Lore
For fifty years the historian and novelist Marina Warner has been teaching us how to see the histories that lie behind myths and symbols, and especially...
Immune to Despair
When I visited Ukraine in July 2016, only one way remained across the Siverskyi Donets River to the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic: a bridge half destroyed...
How to Cast a Metal Lizard
In 1627–1628 Charles I of England bought an enormous art collection from Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. The Gonzaga dynasty had hosted Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Romano...
Promise and Disillusion in South Africa
On a scorching summer morning ten years ago, I attended a rally in a mining settlement north of Johannesburg headlined by Julius Malema, the pudgy, firebrand...
