Photos of Muzan Alneel, photographed and shared by her husband Ahmed Mahmoud. Wednesday April 15, 2026, the third anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s counterrevolutionary war, was also marked by news of the death of Sudanese engineer, activist, intellectual, and visionary Muzan Abuobaida Alneel. Born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1986, Muzan was . . .
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Jim, I expect you would be surprised that your death affected me so much, that I spoke at two services for you, that I am writing about you now. We were friends, but we had not stayed in touch. So, it surprises me too. But you were a friend to me during . . .
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(Photo: Adam Zagajewski, New York Times, 03/25/2021, Alamy) Adam Zagajewski, the great Polish poet and essayist, who died on March 21, wasn’t aloof, as some tried to paint him, especially in Poland, where he had many detractors in the poetry world; he was kind and generous with his time and advice. Was he . . .
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It is Friday, August 7th, and I just finished reading in the New York Times the major, generous, and informative obituary of Eric Bentley, written largely by the late editor of the Times Book Review Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. It was deeply moving to me. For more than sixty years I knew Bentley and much of his major . . .
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Melanerpes carolinus. Photo: Toni Herkalokoch, for the Audobon Society To capture a life in words is not possible, especially when words were—more than anything thing else—the very stuff of that life. It seems to me, then, that only one way could pass for close to adequate in remembering the journalist, translator, and . . .
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These uncertain, unprecedented times have given us all pause, so to speak. Even those of us who have the immense privilege of secure jobs, the relative safety of seclusion, and work that is, as we have recently learned to call it, non-essential, still have reason to wonder whether anything will ever again . . .
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Like a lot of folks since the news came in, I’ve been listening again to John Prine. Among his fans, though, I suspect I was the only one to be reminded of a class in Paris with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a few days after Christian Metz—the film theorist—passed. I remember . . .
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I first met Sterling Stuckey in Chicago fifty-five years ago. In the spring of 1963, Sterling and a group of high school teachers—graduate students at the University of Chicago—were in the process of forming a community-based organization to address the “lack of a proper consideration of the role of the Negro in . . .
Read MoreOne day, during the years I hung out in Paris, Gilles Deleuze opened his lecture with a brief comment about the death at age sixty of his friend and colleague, the philosopher François Chatelet. Along with Foucault and Deleuze, Chatelet had founded the department of philosophy at Vincennes; he had also launched, . . .
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It’s right there in the title of the New York Times obituary: John Ashbery’s work is not only “celebrated,” but it is also “challenging.” PBS calls the poems “enigmatic,” while for NPR they are “confounding.” The more knowing and admiring pieces by poets or critics (sometimes the same people) nuance the point, while still emphasizing difficulty. Mark Ford’s sympathetic . . .
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