May 30, 2019
The Wow Moment: On the Joys of Teaching
June 2009. My classmates and I are gathered in a dimly lit room in Rome, where our instructors, Stephanie Vaughn and Michael Koch, lead Cornell’s annual summer creative writing program […]
January 13, 2017
Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius
Blaming Russia for the outcome of our recent election is, among other things, a way of offloading collective guilt for its result. The same goes for blaming the electoral […]
December 27, 2015
On Failure and Redemption: Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman
Morality begins with an awareness of the sanctity of one’s life, hence the lives of others—even Hitler’s, to begin with—the sheer privilege of being, in this miraculous cosmos, and trying […]
October 29, 2015
Hard and Brittle Religions
Why do some religions die out, while others persist in the face of brutal persecution? Religious diversity, while not completely analogous to biological diversity, has drastically diminished over the […]
March 3, 2015
Night Thoughts (I)
Dickinson’s dashes and erratic capitalizations seem unusual or eccentric only to those who are unfamiliar with 19th century letter-writing. Byron’s letters, for example, are punctuated entirely in Dickinsonese, and similarly […]
January 10, 2014
Illustration of the Greek Concept of Fate
During the sack of Troy, having danced with the others around the wooden Horse and now lying gored in Priam’s palace, Paris had a vision in which he relived his […]