Brief Encounters

In His Father’s Footsteps

“So I continued to visit Jaffa, but I had to rely more on my imagination because the reality was of an entirely different place from what he had described.”

October 16, 2021

Unknown Sources of Lift

“I think there’s an understandable but perilous tendency to conflate art and artist when the artist in question uses autobiographical elements in their work.”

October 9, 2021

Human Diagnostics

“Life in lockdown is not natural for the majority of Homo sapiens. In the ballooning of mental health problems this year, we’ve seen just how deleterious those kinds of restrictions are.”

October 2, 2021

Emissary from a Watery Future

“Writers can’t do a lot about climate change. But writers can help us puzzle through what climate change is doing to us.”

September 25, 2021

Ten Years After Occupy

“Since then, taking part in protests has felt like the rent I pay for living in this world.”

September 18, 2021

Giants of the Northeast Kingdom

“Bread and Puppet was part of a Vermont I didn’t know as a kid, or only saw out of the corner of my eye.”

September 11, 2021

In the Drug Archives

“Our current fascination with psychedelics and mental exploration has a longer history than we recognize.”

September 3, 2021

On the Trail Blazed by W.E.B. Du Bois

“Writing, teaching, activism, organizing—he did everything. And I feel a responsibility, or desire, to reach as many people as I can with my writing that grows out of my interest in the Black struggle.”

August 28, 2021

The Refusal of One Decent Man

“What I have done is to continue in a tradition long hallowed among educated individuals in China by following the dictates of my conscience to speak out against tyranny.”

August 21, 2021

Advanced Hebrew with an Arabic Accent

“Struggling with the language—hating it, loving it, trying to make room for myself in it while fighting it—became essential to my work. At times, I wonder how writers can write at all in their mother tongues.”

August 14, 2021