Brief Encounters

Art of Place

“As art fairs have come to dominate the arts calendar, art feels increasingly placeless, something that parachutes in and just as quickly disappears.”

May 7, 2022

Provocation from Another Soul

“Stanley Cavell was a dazzling teacher. You felt that he was opening his private studio to you, showing you how philosophy gets done rather than simply reporting his findings after the fact.”

April 30, 2022

Nature Doing Its Thing

“I’ve always been drawn to the microcosmic worlds of bugs and tiny creatures; the scenes you discover when you turn over a log or look into a tide pool.”

April 23, 2022

Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm

“The critic’s genres foreground her charismatic authority and its expressive markers. Style, for instance—the gradual revelation of a persona or personality.”

April 16, 2022

Revisiting the Past

“Poems and novels can both come from impulse.”

April 9, 2022

An Evolving View of Inheritance

“Instead of aiming for purity, science should aspire to self-awareness and engagement in a larger project of understanding.”

April 2, 2022

Blue Planet

“Science journalists have always had to find ways of ‘translating’ complicated concepts without sacrificing accuracy, but even over the course of my career the job has gotten so much harder.”

March 26, 2022

The Hidden Crime

“When murderers are rehabilitated without admissions of guilt, and history’s rewritten, a new and awful reality occurs.”

March 19, 2022

Perversions of Historical Memory

“Writing about Russia feels different after this invasion.”

March 12, 2022

Melville Before Coffee

“Every word I use when I write—noun, verb, adjective, adverb—has to be studied and secured before it becomes my word.”

March 5, 2022