Revisiting Cynthia Ozick’s writings on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, both included in the writer’s new career-spanning essay collection, are reminders that all Ozick’s tales feel like cautionary ones—it’s just not always clear what to avoid or how.
If singers and musicians are our culture’s de facto philosophers of love, what do their sometimes headline-grabbing relationships tell us about the art of creating together.
When it comes to 20th century intellectual power-couples, no two represented more disparate ideas about marriage and freedom than the chain-smoking liberationists Sartre and de Beauvoir on the one hand, and the neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman on the other.
The question of whether plants could have consciousness has not been left quietly back in the ’70s, as Linda Besner discovers in Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters.
Does a dream house imply a dream self? Linda Besner, hunting for a home, considers how the photography used in listings serves as a malleable, market-driven form of portraiture.
What’s the meaning of a sentence? A paragraph? Linda Besner considers the abecedarian work that makes Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries so much more than an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation.
