The hazards of communicating by email are well known: the precision of word choice matters when the tone of voice is absent. This is why the emojis that accompany phone texts are so vital. Emojis crown our messages with a tone marked by whatever yellow-headed expression we choose. But for true understanding […]
When someone in my book club chose Their Eyes Were Watching God as our next book, I was startled. I had not thought of that novel since grad school. But I dove back in, through the thicket of phonetic dialogue that today would be verboten, and found Janie all over again. Talk about […]
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out. The man is a consummate storyteller. […]
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 […]
The last time I studied a language, it was high-school French taught by a elderly nun with a Texan accent who promised a class on “erotic cultures” when she meant “exotic.” Duolingo is definitely cooler, and almost as much fun as that snorting, tittering class. But the Spanish itself is driving me crazy. […]
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 […]
A journalist friend emails: “I’m not sure what to make of Pamela Paul’s decision (assuming she wasn’t forced out).” I stare at the message for a second, thinking only: who is Pamela Paul? A New York Times columnist, it turns out—and I subscribe. But lazily. I write back, saying that after skimming Paul’s goodbye column, […]
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 […]
Every political moment has its tropes. Our current political moment has at least two. The first, used to describe any dizzying scale of change across time, stems from a reminder by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis ) though it is commonly attributed to a paraphrase by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin): “There are decades where […]
Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk was in town the last couple of days as a guest of WashU’s International Writers Series and on tour for her new English-language collection, Still City (November 2024, Pitt Poetry Series). She has previously published two collections in Ukrainian. Maksymchuk is also a scholar and literary translator; she […]