Tag
Memory
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Jazmine Ulloa on “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory”
“We tend to see El Paso as this very narrow space that divides Mexico and the United States, but it’s this much richer region where ideas and goods and people are constantly flowing back and forth.”
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Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
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Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That’s not the whole story.
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B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms …
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In Memoriam: Agnes Heller
Agnes Heller, the Hungarian-born political philosopher, died recently, at the age of 90. The obituaries in outlets like the New York Times, Le Monde, and Deutsche Welle have been respectful, and even …
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B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds …
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Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t recovered until 2003, when, along Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth, a man and his two children stumbled across her bones. This was…
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B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but …
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Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a …
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“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen …
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“A Thousand Years” of Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard has a gift for seeing similarities. In every gallery of her Survey at the Whitney, this capacity for sensing, finding, and producing similarities is …
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Ireland’s Uneasy Monuments
“History,” writes Fergal Keane, “began with my father’s stories.” These were stories of Oliver Cromwell’s murders, of the dead of the Irish Famine, of wars of …
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B-Sides: “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’”
On November 26, 1893, a 13-year-old Anglo-Brazilian girl opens her diary to record a rescue mission. Helena’s father, a diamond miner in Diamantina, in …
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Two Islands, Two Fates: Inishbofin and Inishark, Ireland
To get to Inishbofin, an island nine miles off the west coast of Ireland, you take a …
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My Neighbor Octavia
For years, I knew Octavia E. Butler, the famed African American science fiction and fantasy writer, by her first name only. That was the way she introduced herself when I first met her back in the fall of 1999 …
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The Art of Protest
I marched with thousands on the streets of New York, asserting that “Trump is Not Our President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” So far we are free to assemble on Union Square in New York, to march up Fifth Avenue, to shout our anger, our fear, and our resolve. The street and soil are still ours to share. As I…
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We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign …
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All About My Mother
In her canonical 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wonders how a coherent past may be reconstructed from countless angles, styles, and past selves. How do we choose from so many snapshots and memories? And how do we differentiate ourselves from the people and surroundings that shaped us? Woolf ultimately decides to…
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“The Sandman” @200
In 1816, only four years after the Brothers Grimm brought out a collection of fairy tales carefully selected and edited for the use of children, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his “Nutcracker and Mouse King.” To the extent that Hoffmann’s fairy tale introduced rather weird, even scary elements, his story departed significantly from what the…
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The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can be just as brutal. For now the victors would get to rule over more than just territory: they would get…
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Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the…
