Swimming Between Two Cities
Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “Two Cities” sticks with me: On each side of the strait, two cities one blacked out, occupied…
Monthly Archives: August 2017
What Was Eclipsed?
A theme emerged from the week’s coverage of the eclipse: that on the morning of August 21, as darkness swept across…
Today We Got Death Threats
My daughter called me, frantic, this afternoon. Someone had left a message on the landline answering machine, directed at my…
Memory, from Yugoslavia to Charlottesville
Over the past week, I’ve been reading Serbian writer Nina Zivancevic’s Inside & Outside of Byzantium, a 1994 collection that…
Gods and Gastropods
It is 1968. I am eleven years old. In the last few months, I have begun reorganizing my late childhood,…
Dunkirk and Dreamtime
Note: This content contains spoilers. A few weeks ago, YR and RB invited me along to the Arclight for a…
John Hersey, Hiroshima
Seventy-one years ago, in August 1946, The New Yorker printed in its entirety John Hersey’s report on the effects of…
Wendell Berry, Roots to the Earth
I just read Roots to the Earth, a collection of Wendell Berry’s poetry and prose on American rural life. It…
Bureaucrats, Ancestors, and Nabokov’s Butterflies
Though bureaucracy is unloved, many of us devote our leisure time to bureaucratic pursuits. We organize needle and thread in…
“Tolerance” is a Loaded Gun
C.W. is in town for a few days from Kosovo. He’s left the NGO he joined a few years ago:…
Left Write & Centaur 