This fall’s college freshmen were seven years old when the US invaded Afghanistan. Most don’t remember the protests in the days before the invasion, which, as a college freshman in September 2001, I attended in Seattle. They don’t remember the predictions one heard at those marches—that the Bush administration would soon engineer . . .
Read MorePre-war literature is what you write in hopes that you won’t have to write postwar literature. The nice thing about it is that everybody is still alive. The guy who works at the corner store down the street. The guy who works at the corner store down the street in Iran too. . . .
Read MoreI admit it. I’m an addict. I just can’t stop watching, surfing, and listening to all this stuff. I know it’s vacuous, misdirected, and it’s certainly not good for me, but I do it anyway. Not only did I watch the entire so-called debate last night, I also watched the post-festum cud-chewers . . .
Read MoreI assume that you’ve been paying attention lately, and as a result, are suitably outraged, so I won’t have to tell you about Stéphane Hessel. You’ll already know his incredible story: how he moved from Berlin to Paris in 1924, when he was only seven. How, with his father, a German-Jewish writer, . . .
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Yet how could it be otherwise? In Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers, Jules Chametzky, a founding editor of MR, has assembled his reflections on and recollections of an amazing array of writers, many more than the thirty-one crystalline chapters in this jewel of a book. Not least among its contributions . . .
Read MoreYesterday, we needed something for the MR Facebook page. We noticed that it was Roger Federer’s birthday, but how could that be post-worthy for MR? The first issue pulled from the archives, serendipitously, had a pretty great tennis poem. It worked beautifully to tie a popular person with MR! The poem “The . . .
Read MoreChristopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has generated a disproportionate interest and enthusiasm, even among those who would not normally take notice of an action or superhero film (I count myself here). The trilogy clearly takes itself more seriously than most of the films in its genre, and surely the Batman story itself is better . . .
Read MoreBack in early March, when the NGO Invisible Children posted their video Kony 2012 on YouTube and Facebook, the result was unprecedented in any sort of social networking, and inconceivable within the world of human rights organizations. Within weeks the film had been viewed over 100 million times, making it to date the single . . .
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Like any enduring cultural form, the novel has many origins, and its history has been told many times. Safe to say, in any case, that our ideas about psychology and our techniques for novelistic characterization were born as twins. One parent, certainly, was the early modern pseudo-science of physiognomy, which the OED . . .
Read MoreSometimes you just have to break the rules. Some time ago now, one of our editors heard Karen Tei Yamashita read a truly stunning piece, “Borges & I,” a work which crosses the border between essay and fiction, and between history and poetry as well. When he told the rest of us . . .
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