Columns

My first act of writing, after having a baby in early January of this year, was a February journal entry. I do not keep journals—my essays and poems mark time for me. But sometimes we are hurled toward what we normally don’t do.

I love jazz, the way individuals combine into an irreducible whole—unpredictable but coherent, a collaborative act of unbounded creation. When I see a good jazz combo, I see humanity itself.

My father, a conscientious objector and lifelong man of peace, handed me the revolver and told me that his father would have wanted me to have it.

What is a salamander without a cool, damp, shady place full of hiding space and things like worms and snails and slugs to eat? With its habitat? *

VQR columnist and neuroscientist Jim Coan’s comic-styled column Drawing It Out asks the human questions at the heart of scientific inquiry.

On June 17, 1951, natives of the Ukrainian village Liskuvate began parting ways with everything they’d ever known. Earlier that year, the Soviet Union put a plan in motion to acquire Polish land that held valuable coal deposits.

We read Paradise Lost my senior year of high school in Mr. P’s AP English class. Mr. P was married to my first-year English teacher, whose maiden name was often confused in my mind with the delicate membrane, sought after and highly...