Books, Arts, and Culture

It’s that time of the year for Best Of Lists–er, okay so maybe it’s not because it’s only October and this is way early. Usually this...

In the middle of a gusty October three years ago, The New York Times published an obituary under the headline “Sue Hubbell, Who Wrote of Bees...

“Among Finnish peoples,” I read with close attention at age eleven in the impressively weighty Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, magic made its influence felt throughout all...

In December 1905 Richard Strauss’s opera Salome—blasphemous and obscene in its libretto, fiercely dissonant in its music—had its scandalous premiere in Dresden, and Franz Lehár’s operetta...

At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was...

I intended this essay, successively, to coincide with various recent events: the death of a president, the launch of a book, the anniversary of a revolution....

In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou...

About two thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice, just as Elizabeth Bennet has begun to conquer her bias against the arrogant Mr. Darcy, and...