We all owe our lives to someone’s vision and someone else’s blind spot, but it’s seldom quite so literal: I owe my existence to that tumor and the sight lines that developed around it.
We lift our glasses to the river that has been for a very long time not a river, the river that is reenchanting Los Angeles, the river that will soon power an enormous waterwheel, which will turn right here where we are standing.
California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final...
The scrutiny to which South Africa is incessantly exposed is a search for answers to two sets of questions. The questions are complex. Therefore the answers are complex and controversial. Even the choice of answers is constantly influenced...
As we look back upon the first and greatest ordeal of dismemberment suffered by the British Empire, we can see clearly enough from our vantage point how very acute George the Third was when he observed to Lord North in 1774: “The dye is now...
He was old when we met him first, the grizzled veteran of a thousand wars, literary and other, and standing then on the brink of his eightieth birthday. They said that he would celebrate the occasion quietly in Paris, taking the train from...
