A. S. Hamrah Objects in Space at a Moment in Time Michael Mann’s biopic of Enzo Ferrari is suffused with a sense of death and loss. February 3, 2024
Ben Ratliff Not Not Jazz When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band. January 13, 2024
Francesca Wade Court and Spark Across her stories and novels, Susan Taubes explored the frustration and freedom of estrangement. May 27, 2023
Jamieson Webster End Notes: Palliative Care in a Pandemic Many, in the early days, said the virus did not stop at borders, did not respect hierarchies, that it affected all equally. Covid-19 was democratic. We were deceived. April 24, 2020
Shannon Pufahl Numbering the Dead A hundred and fifty years ago, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. Now, we speak easily in the statistics of absence, of fifty dead in a mass shooting, of fourteen hundred missing in an earthquake, as if this has always been done. April 21, 2020
Mona Chalabi The Rising Cost of Not Living The median pricetag of a funeral in 2017 was $7,360—a cost that would take the typical US worker five months of labor to cover. Because of these high prices, many families are panicking at the same time that they are grieving. December 16, 2019
Jessica Weisberg Death’s Best Friend “We live in a very particular death-denying society,” said Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. “We isolate both the dying and the old, and it serves a purpose. They are reminders of our own mortality.” April 2, 2018
Mark Harman Kafka’s Message from the Emperor Hauntingly oblique, the story weaves together child-like hopefulness and stoical resignation, metaphysical yearning and psychological insight, a seemingly Chinese tale and covert Jewish themes. July 1, 2011
Charles Simic Last Words Why the enormous interest in the final thoughts of men and women who were often guilty of committing horrific crimes? It must be the same morbid curiosity that brought huge crowds of Americans to public executions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many considered these grim occasions so much fun they brought their families along. July 7, 2010