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...
Since its first issue in 1925, the Virginia Quarterly Review has distinguished itself among literary magazines for its iconoclastic approach to American letters and world affairs. A century later, we’re naturally curious to know what...
In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather thrashing in a gravel bed.
For more than fifty years, I have been studying and writing about political repression and higher education, with a special emphasis on McCarthyism, long considered by historians to be the most serious assault on academic freedom since the...
