Books, Arts, and Culture

On September 16, 2021, we published Molly Crabapple’s essay “Occupy Memory,” a personal reminiscence about the movement that began—exactly ten years ago—with a protest gathering in...

Charles Dickens was a great coiner of words—over four hundred, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—but “monopolylogue” was not among them. Credit for that particular invention...

In the past thirty years a scholarly revolution has altered our notion of the first thousand years of Christianity. We no longer see it as an...

I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation...

Even among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case. The architect of...

Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about...

On March 17, 1709, Antoine Galland, the French translator of The Thousand and One Nights, wrote in his diary of meeting in Paris a certain “Hanna,”...

It is hard, looking at the young Alessandro de’ Medici in Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting of 1534–1535, not to empathize. Long-nosed and tender-eyed, he has a...

What to Look For in Spring,…Summer,…Autumn, and…Winter are four small books published in the early 1960s by Ladybird, a legendary British children’s publisher. The charmingly eccentric...