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Dostoyevsky’s Empathy
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871 I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a...
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Dostoyevsky’s Empathy
We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! A woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg for The Idiot, ca. 1940s. I A Few Facts He wore five-pound...
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Parting Shot
“Famous last words” and Japanese death poems offer two strikingly different approaches to mortality. Edvard Munch, By The Deathbed (Fever) I, 1915. I was born in the middle of March in a small town...
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Suicide Blonde at Twenty-Five
From the cover of the first edition of Suicide Blonde. “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” so begins Darcey Steinke’s “sensational” second novel,...
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The Questionable History of the Future
Many centuries ago, as history was being developed and before there was an idea of what prehistoric humans were like, societies generally imagined themselves to be of divine origin and to have...
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Staff Picks: Singing, Sequins, and Slaughterhouses
Still from On Body and Soul. “I would like to sleep / with you, to enter / your sleep,” go a few lines from Margaret Atwood’s 1981 poem “Variations on the Word Sleep,” and I recently found myself...
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Staff Picks: Good Guys, Goose Fat, and Ghosts of Mars
Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha. There was a time when I found online dating apps addictive. It was a guiltless game: arbitrarily judging prospects by a series of photos, a far-fetched...
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Staff Picks: Whisky Priests, World’s End, and Brilliant Friends
Still from Episode 1 (debut 11/18/18) of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, “Le Bambole (The Dolls).” Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO. I tend to be suspicious of film and television adaptations of my favorite...
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The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary
Sixteenth-century icon depicting Emerentia, Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus Christ. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. “Saint who?” I asked....
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The Bible and Poetry
Initial S: A Monk Praying in the Water, Getty Center. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating...
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