Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

O ne night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

From a speech given by the Tennessee state senator in April during a debate on a bill to make camping along highways a misdemeanor. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a ...

T he only thing everyone can agree on about why Donald Trump does what he does is that his reasons are not obvious. There are innumerable proposals on offer for an intellectual framework that ...

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Edmund Wilson’s bravura narrative of the history of socialism, To the Finland Station, begins, rather surprisingly, with a reflection on Vico. “It is strange and stirring,” Wilson writes, “to find in ...

Our misunderstanding of relevance may come from a single word in the OED definition: “Appropriate or applicable in the (esp. current) context.”In the age of Twitter feeds and nonstop news, our ...

A revisionist view of the drug wars. Discussed in this essay: Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala, translated by William Savinar.Vanderbilt ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...