From the Blog

10 Questions for Alex de Voogt

October 23, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

One candle will suffice.      The light somewhat subdued
will be better suited,      will be more agreeable
as Love is drawing closer,     as its Shadows arrive.

One candle will suffice.      The room should indulge
in two much light tonight.
—from "For them to arrive" by C.P. Cavafy, Translated by Alex de Voogt

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was studying an East African board game, known as bao, for my thesis, I encountered a poem on the subject. Muyaka bin Haji, a famous Swahili poet of the early nineteenth century had written a...

Dr. Rieux, Meet Dr. Fauci

October 22, 2020 - By Lynn Levin

(Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID Director. Photo: NIAID)

Seeing Albert Camus’s The Plague with 2020 Vision

In the summer of 2020, seventeen Drexel University students, many of them international students, Zoomed into my Great Works class to explore Albert Camus’s The Plague. The students found themselves amazed at how eerily this World War Two allegory paralleled our own struggle with Covid-19. Many characters in the novel endure quarantine, exile, and the pain of separation from loved ones, and so did a number of my students. Camus describes many of his characters’ actions as expressing the best of humanity; similarly, my students gained a sense of optimism as they observed the empathy and...

No One Likes a Bully

October 21, 2020 - By Ward Schumaker

In 1991, during the confirmation hearing of William Barr as George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General, a lawyer named Jimmy Lohman published a piece in an obscure periodical, the Florida Flambeau. Lohman had been a classmate of Barr in high school and again later, at Columbia, and he remembered Barr well: “Billy was my very own high school tormentor.....a classic bully...a porky ninth grader who had a vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass...he lived to make me miserable.” Barr had brothers who were much like him, writes Lohman, and together they picketed the school’s fund-raising Junior Carnival “because the proceeds were going to the NAACP.” At Columbia, Barr “teamed up with New York City riot police to attack anti-war...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 8

October 20, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

(Station platform in London. The Independent: Getty Photo)

            “Save my skin and damn my conscience.”
Remember when the sun shone easy, say eight years ago, about this time of year? Remember when life was comfortable, life was fine? Sure, plenty remained undone, but we’d come out of the worst of a disastrous economic downturn, the machinery of electoral politics looked to be functioning smoothly, neither the incumbent president nor his opponent was a raving sociopathic sexual harasser and white nationalist pseudo-fascist, and...

10 Questions for Brooke Sahni

October 19, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

First, we were taught how to spell
His name, then we were told to draw Him.
It was an exercise in metaphor.
The balls of paper amassed before me
while my class mates drew stars, maps of the Holy Land.
I thought I should color everything I could think of
—from "G-d, a Portrait," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
For as long as I could write, I have. I’ve always had journals, but one of the first “formal” pieces I remember writing was in 3rd grade—a short book called Chloe, about a golden retriever princess. My teacher, generously, told me she couldn’t wait to see my first book in a bookstore one day; this stayed with me...