Life underground, for many of the things that have adapted to it, is like this: The lines between alive and not alive, dead and not, get blurred. Examining these lives raises uncomfortable questions about the very thing we think of as life...
Thomas Pynchon found an accommodating symbol in the Aggregat 4 (aka the V-2) rocket, a weapon that could not save the war for the Greater German Reich but became operational soon enough to kill thousands huddled under the throbbing sirens...
On June 28, 1942, Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary, “Even if I hated Germany, I would not thereby become un-German, I could not tear what was German out of me.” A Protestant convert of Jewish parentage, Klemperer had been forced out of...
Pascal’s wager—that saw of Christian apologetics—is conventionally understood to demonstrate that human beings deny the Christian God’s existence at the risk of perdition. The seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal weighed the...
There is a strain of Black campus novel that is obsessed with “realness.” I can trace its origins to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator leads his college’s white trustee on a darkly comic and ill-fated tour of the Black...
