memory

The Memory Hole

By drawing broad conclusions about Joe Biden’s mental capacities, Robert Hur’s special counsel report went far beyond its remit—but it still leaves Democrats with a political dilemma.

February 11, 2024

On Photography, Colonial History, and Collective Memory

“I want photographs to bring me closer to storytelling, to help me understand tragedy.”

October 3, 2020

Finding a Path Through the Odyssey

I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem.

September 7, 2020

Stopping in Vilna: Stendhal & the Holocaust Trail

In Vilna, after three years of traveling in search of my family’s story, three years of interviewing people about the worst imaginable things, I couldn’t take it any more. Two things broke me.

October 1, 2019

The Artist I Grew Up With

It’s always exciting to think about works of art or literature in relation to the person who made them, especially if you have some direct acquaintance with the artist. The usual order of events, of course, is that you grow familiar with the work and later meet the man or woman behind it, at an opening or a reading or some social event. What matters, then, is that the artist be on a par with the art, and for a serious admirer, disappointment is almost inevitable. But things are quite different when you know the artist well before you see the work, and even more so when you actually grew up with him.

November 20, 2012

Memory Traps

It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already deep in shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again.

November 19, 2012

After the Occupation

“When the decision to pull out of Lebanon was announced, twenty-two years of Israeli occupation was dismantled in a matter of forty-eight hours. I guessed that the soldiers occupying our house were just about to sit down for lunch when they got the call. It was such a strange sight. Even the glasses were still filled with water. They didn’t even get the chance to have a sip.”

October 18, 2012

Gays and The New York Times

If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday morning in January 1971 to discover “What it Means to be a Homosexual,” a deeply personal and beautifully written piece in defense of homosexuality.

September 25, 2012

Shanghai: Vigor in the Decay

This is a story that sounds familiar, that we think we know or can imagine: old houses torn down for luxury malls, ordinary people poorly compensated, an intimate way of life replaced by highways and high-rises. All of this is happening in Shanghai—and dozens of cities across China and around the world—but it’s not how Howard French and Qiu Xiaolong tell it in their unusual new book of photographs, poems, and essays, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life.

September 24, 2012

France and the Holocaust

We’ve gathered this morning to remember the horror of a crime, express the sorrow of those who experienced the tragedy, and speak of the dark hours of collaboration, our history, and therefore France’s responsibility. We’re also here to pass on the memory of the Holocaust—of which the roundups were the first stage—in order to fight the battle against oblivion and testify to new generations what barbarity is capable of doing and what resources humanity may possess to defeat it.

August 18, 2012