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Henry James in St. Louis

      After living abroad for three decades, novelist Henry James returned to the United States in 1904 and 1905 to to be “a restless analyst” of all he saw in an ascendant America, which had changed greatly since he had left for Paris and London. The nonfiction book that came of the trip […]

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz Sums the Decades

        The documentary Joel Meyerowitz: The Pulse of the Street (2016), directed by Philippe Jamet, is available on the streaming platform The Darkroom Rumour. As I suggested in a previous post, Darkroom Rumour has aggregated 100 films on photography, with categories ranging from major figures in the art to “emerging,” reportage, architectural, […]

Bleak House v. Trump

        Few processes are more tedious to observe yet more consequential in outcome than lawsuits. If you work in higher education, the pillars of which the Trump administration has threatened to topple by way of grant and funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), two […]

Why April Really Is a Cruel Month

      T.S. Eliot is literary modernism’s most famous poet. So we can all be forgiven for thinking him merely ironic when he opened his most famous poem by intoning that, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire… ” By the time Eliot gets past winter, […]

Into the Tallow End

        Maybe it sat on the sill of your mother’s kitchen window near the sink. Or perhaps it lodged in an old tin coffee can on your back porch. Wherever it resided, this pale-colored solid, speckled with bits of meat floating below a film of watered residue, was the leftover that would […]

What If Harvard Went Out of Business?

        I would call it a modest proposal, but Swift did not really mean his to be taken straight. I do think Harvard University, preeminent symbol of American education, intellect, striving, and continuity, should be prepared to go out of business. So should Columbia University, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, […]

The Nominal Joys of a Discombobulated Text

        Anyone fortunate enough to have an education in classical rhetoric knows by heart the four forms of discourse: argumentation, exposition, description, and narration. Aristotle taught us not only that language was the chief tool of persuasion, but also how to persuade. Centuries later, writers and novelists such as Jane Austen and […]