We ‘are’ our attention; but when we are attentive, we aren’t ‘there’—at least not for others. And perhaps not even for ourselves.” ...

In Woolf’s final, unfinished manuscript, she employs a “methodology of disorder” that enables “that state of mind in which it ...

Rose Hobart presages Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958) by more than twenty years. Made of found footage that Conner took from ...

February 6, 2026 – “We are supposed to read triptychs from left to right: Adam and Eve → sexy fruit playground of jubilant ...

The problem we face involves the degree to which the truth must now compete with such a vast multiplicity of falsehoods that discovering truth itself becomes unviable.” ...

January 28, 2016 – Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to another Horace—Mann—dated January 28, 1754. The occasion was pretty unremarkable—it was a happy ...

January 29, 2015 – W. H. Auden was a professor at the University of Michigan for the 1941–42 academic year. His course was called Fate and the Individual in European ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

January 22, 2013 – Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy ...

Of teaching Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with ...

January 25, 2013 – “I’ve fallen in love or imagine I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.” —Leo Tolstoy, January 25, 1851 ...