January 1, 2026 – "On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You ...

Dream. “Pline,” a kind of traditional ice cream, was being phased out at a beachside inn, and the locals were enraged. Dream.

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a ...

In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the ...

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in ...

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes.

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio. Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it?

Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). “Eenty, teenty, ...