And then they started fighting about what the gravestone would say. Noam’s dad wanted “Son, something, and friend, plucked in the prime of his life.” He didn’t know what the “something” would be yet, just that there had to be three things...
Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers...
In 1904, University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman cooked up the idea of starting a magazine whose mission would be guided by new books and the inquiries they provoked about the world of literature and the world at large. Though...
The metallic desks in the administrative offices of IIT-Delhi, India’s top-ranked engineering college, hadn’t been moved since 1976; nor had their bureaucratic occupants. This created in the office an atmosphere of geopolitical resignation...
It’s easy to be cynical about Syria. Westerners have become largely inured to the bad news coming out of the country, where, under the brutal Baathist regimes of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, before him, tragedy had come to seem...
In the late summer, I became obsessed with a particular tree. I was pushing my daughter’s stroller toward the library on Argyle Road when I saw it. The gray limbs were pale in the distance, the trunk goliath. Dust and pollen hung in the...
