With less than a thousand words (in her recent preface to a New York magazine photographic portfolio by Mark Peterson, with additional reporting by James D. Walsh), Claudia Rankine has offered what is, for her, a typically eloquent and essential assessment of the state of our nation. She begins with Dylann Storm . . .
Read More
The ongoing crisis in Chile has brought the country to a standstill, unsettling the daily lives of all citizens. However, it has done more than just that. Mass protests have a way of altering the personhood of everyone involved in ways previously unimagined. Over the last week, thirty days after the eruption . . .
Read More
One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about the end of WWI: “It was . . .
Read More
Art: “Examination of a Witch,” Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853, detail. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Perhaps I stayed up too late. Perhaps I didn’t need to go downstairs right at midnight to look up the Witch of Hadley (my little town—the farming community between Amherst and Northampton, home to prime farmland, big . . .
Read More
(Hamburg, Germany. Early estimates report over 50,000 protesters today, participating in the Global Climate Strike.) In a recent, as yet unpublished work, the Italian writer and activist Erri De Luca salutes the youth of today and welcomes the rise and return of a generation of activists: “Today’s youth know the risks they . . .
Read MoreYep. Though I probably should avoid mixed mammaliaphors, I do think I’ve belled that cat. Skunks have a certain well-earned reputation; it’s not one they earn by making friends. Few—at least outside their immediate families, which tend to be small—can stand to be around them for long. One wonders how they ever . . .
Read More
Extending “World Wide Welcome” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor . . .
Read More
“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” Fran Lebowitz I want to tell the story of a T-shirt. Not material history—not the story of its cotton, possibly Egyptian, of the history of child labor in the Nile basin, or of recent efforts . . .
Read More
Dear President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell, I am writing to you as a scholar of the Holocaust and as a two-time Stanford University Press author. I was distressed to read this past week in various news sources that you plan to significantly cut support for the press. According to those who work . . .
Read More
So… I got the news yesterday, while listening to my car radio, and then almost drove off the road. I immediately pulled over and checked my email: two of my friends from Hampshire College had already written, and a third would soon after. Like them, though mostly for them, I felt as . . .
Read More