What if, the next time I feel consumed, swallowed up, I reframe what is happening? What if I make myself the subject instead of the object and thereby own the verb? I have eaten something bad for me—or maybe even good for me, like medicine, but bitter.
America’s oldest sport carries trappings of America’s oldest problems. So does my life, with its ambivalence toward wealth, hating its injustice and excess but craving its—what? Elegance?
Generalizing from survey results, the majority of U.S. citizens are uneasy with the values that form journalism’s core. And no, this is not the alt-right booing section—the responses cut across all ideological leanings.
I like big talk. Sweeping discussions of why we are on this planet and what we should do to fix it. I want people to explain bits of the world to me or, better yet, pull back the curtain so I can peer inside their soul.
A new study is the first to identify 267 genes that distinguish modern humans from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Nearly all those 267 genes helped shape the behaviors that distinguish us: creativity, self-awareness, cooperativeness, and the ability to do what doctors always nag us to do, take active steps to make sure we lead a long and healthy life.
In the scale of my tiny life, my mother is as timeless as Shakespeare, her insights just as relevant. I fight to remember the past tense, and then I think, Why?
Ursula K. Le Guin storms the Library of America.
The fact that our costume began as a sturdy and predictable garment, then evolved into a million variations and constant novelty—how American is that?
The essays in The History of the Future often chronicle the various ways these places and their founders, planners, architects, or investors imagined the future alongside the ways the future did and did not cooperate. Even where wrong (and they almost always were), their vision still shapes the fruits of their labors in ways they never would have wished.
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.