Eclipsed by Fame
The world’s first scientist-celebrity, Isaac Newton, was entombed in Westminster Abbey with high ceremony, alongside statesmen and royalty, under a monument ornately carved in white-and-gray marble,...
A Praise House of Many Mansions
Worn wooden benches were filled to capacity on a Sunday morning in Georgia. Men and women sat shoulder to shoulder, slowly rocking, trying to forget the...
‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’
On October 24, 2017, Paulette Wilson was transferred from Britain’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre to London’s Heathrow Airport for deportation to Jamaica. It didn’t take...
The Companionship of Nature
In her tour-de-force memoir, H Is for Hawk (2014), the English writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald described how she survived her grief over the death of...
Averted Intimacies
There are two common ways in which a literary canon is titled and presented to the public. One is simply as a list of “best” books....
When Poverty Became Profane
On December 1, 2020, with the holiday season approaching and the latest congressional stimulus package stalled, The Washington Post reported that “about 26 million Americans say...
Can America Remain Preeminent?
Down to the final days of Donald Trump’s time in office, any attempt to measure the much-commented-upon decline of American power in the world had to...
Which Musonius?
To the Editors: In his “Tune Out & Lean In” [NYR, March 11], Gregory Hays discusses recent translations and introductions that aim to make later Stoics...
Victory and Misery in Haiti
To the Editors: There are some dangerous misstatements and curious falsehoods in Ferdinand Mount’s recent review of David A. Bell’s Men on Horseback [NYR, January 14]....
Dividends of a Just Economy
Ever since the early twentieth century, advocates of taming capitalism in the public interest have assumed that energized citizens and activist government could counter the power...
