Christopher Benfey

Pranksters and Puritans

Peter Mancall’s biography of Thomas Morton discusses Morton’s attempts to provoke the Pilgrims and undercut the Puritans.

Life’s Merry-Go-Round

From Rilke to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the carousel has embodied the sadness of lost innocence. And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges—even on Donald Trump.

The Mystery of the Missing Viola

A parable of the prodigal player whose instrument was lost and now is found.

Missed Steps

So many steps! So many turns! A leap. A landing. And done. The other dancers had no trouble remembering the steps. I had trouble.

The Haiku of Confinement

Bedridden in his Odéon apartment, Richard Wright spent the last year and a half of his life writing haiku.

The Opposite of Ordinary

Pandemic Journal, April 6–12

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham, Hugh Eakin in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dalia Hatuqa in Amman, and more.

The Year of the Amazon?

If Jeff Bezos named his firm after the Amazon River, how did the river itself come to be called the Amazon? Was the rainforest once inhabited by golden-crowned women warriors mounted on fleet-footed steeds?

Bowling with Melville

Instead of writing an epic on whaling, could Melville have written the epic of bowling instead? Now that would have been “a ten-stroke” indeed.

How Rodin Kept His Feet on the Ground

Rodin himself rejected the idea of the idealized thinker with his head in the clouds rather than his feet in the dirt.

The Tragic Hubris of Kipling’s ‘If—’

“Kipling’s morality is imperialist only to the extent that it is closely linked to a specific historical reality,” wrote Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader and translator of “If—,” from one of Mussolini’s prisons, “but there are lessons in the poem for any social group struggling for political power.”

Webster’s Acrobatics

Cornering the Word Market

The Bees That Live on Human Tears

The story of bees feeding on the Taiwanese woman’s tears went viral. But poets seem to have known about the special significance of bees all along, and their connection to what Virgil called lacrimae rerum, “the tears of things.”

The Torments of Spring

I’m dreading the arrival of spring. It’s not that I prefer winter. But there’s something about spring that gives me pause. “You mention spring’s delaying—I blamed her for the opposite,” Emily Dickinson wrote, in May 1866. “I would eat evanescence slowly.” That’s me in a nutshell.

A Cure for Metaphor-Blindness

Jesus tries to teach his disciples this other way—this metaphorical way—of talking and seeing. But he fails repeatedly. And he is thrilled when he encounters someone who does know her way around metaphors.

Is It Like Japan Yet?

The Don of Trumpery

For Trump, naming is branding. Extending the Trump brand appears to have been the central driver of his initially only half-serious presidential bid, and it continues to drive Trump’s presidency, as he dreams, no doubt, of a Trump Tower on Mars.

Coffins and Jukeboxes

Stanley Cavell, 1926–2018

None of us spoke in his classes, or did so only rarely. We all mainly listened as Cavell thought aloud, worried a passage, fired off rhetorical questions without waiting for an answer, sulked, and raved.