More on: Culture

Burning Bright. Curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff and Timothy Young at the Yale Center for British Art, Fall 2025. Elizabeth Wyckoff. Blake. Yale Center for British Art Collection Series, 2025. WE HAVE HAD THE WORD ICON FOR A WHILE, since the 1570s at least in our language, but it has recently been subjected to fairly comprehensive…

TWO YEARS AFTER I received a monstrous beating, I became interested in pietàs. What happened, according to the police report filed in Morris Park, was this: The G train approached the Flushing Avenue stop at nine on a Tuesday evening. The car was half full. I was journaling and reading Flaubert. A man in matching…

I am content to dwell in ambiguities and conflict, understanding, as I see it, that we are all caught in inescapable systems, systems of value or belief, linguistic systems, systems upon systems within systems, which permit or preclude, which shape and suggest and stifle our apprehension of reality.

Russell’s description of oblivion as a poison is clarifying. The book left me wondering what our modern oblivions are. Into what vaults do we deposit our lives, robbing ourselves of the tools to understand them?

Manu Larcenet. The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Harry N. Abrams, 2024. A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eight million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at…

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

Most days, belief in anything beyond the day before me felt unfathomable. But my disorientation presented me with an opening, a paradoxical invitation to entertain what I would typically have considered beyond the barometer of belief.

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.