Interview Pinning our hopes on our machines September 12, 2022 One day in 1999 some children playing in the streets of Kalkaji, New Delhi, found a computer fixed in a wall that separated their poor neighborhood from a rich office district. It might have been a strange sight for these young residents of such disadvantaged circumstances, but within hours they had mastered some basic workings of the device and had begun surfing the web. Read More
Essay A look inside Bedeviled September 06, 2022 The glass of science is half empty. Researchers across the globe are fixated on all that we do not know yet. It was the same one hundred years ago, and more than one hundred years before then too. Read More
Essay A look inside The Secret Body July 27, 2022 Imagine yourself as an alien with an exceptionally powerful telescope trying to understand what happens on Earth. Read More
Essay Welcome to Armageddon July 19, 2022 Each day throughout the year, the tour buses begin arriving at Megiddo soon after 9:00 a.m., disgorging fifty tourists at a time. By the time the site closes at 5:00 p.m., several dozen buses will have deposited hundreds of visitors. “Welcome to Armageddon,” the tour guides say, as they march their flocks up the steep incline and through the ancient city gate. Read More
Essay Conservatism as a political practice July 13, 2022 Before the story goes on, some ground needs to be cleared. What is conservatism? What is this a story of? There are no knockdown facts here. Read More
Essay A new way of life July 06, 2022 Every day billions of people devote a significant amount of time to worshiping an imaginary being. More precisely, they praise, exalt, and pray to the God of the major Abrahamic religions. They put their hopes in—and they fear—a transcendent, supernatural deity that, they believe, created the world and now exercises providence over it. Read More
Essay Taxing the light of heaven June 27, 2022 There is no bloodshed in our last story, but it takes us to the heart of the tax-design problem. This is the tale of the window tax, imposed in Britain from 16971 to 1851. Read More
Essay The complex origins, development, and meanings of human rights June 14, 2022 In 2015, a young girl and her father crossed into the United States from the border with Mexico. Astrid and Arturo, K’iche’ Indians from Guatemala, were fleeing the systematic discrimination and violence their people have suffered for decades. Read More
Essay Seamus Heaney, pseudonym ‘Incertus’ June 13, 2022 When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. Read More
Essay Life-changing doubt, the Internet, and a crisis of authority June 01, 2022 Yisroel was an earnestly pious boy growing up Hasidic in Brooklyn, New York. With his side curls grazing his shoulders, thick plastic glasses, and big black velvet yarmulke, he looked like all the other boys in his yeshiva, where he studied the Torah and its commentaries from early in the morning until late at night. Read More
Essay Why some mistaken views catch on May 18, 2022 As I was walking back from university one day, a respectable-looking middle-aged man accosted me. He spun a good story: he was a doctor working in the local hospital, he had to rush to some urgent doctorly thing, but he’d lost his wallet, and he had no money for a cab ride. Read More
Essay Jhumpa Lahiri: Where I find myself May 16, 2022 Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Read More
Essay Goodbye, Europe May 12, 2022 Depending on how you look at it, the timing was either fortunate or ill-fated. The Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science met at Harvard from 3–9 September 1939. Read More
Essay Kafka’s “Ultimate Things”: A new reading of the Zürau aphorisms April 27, 2022 As Princeton University Press celebrates the launch of a new annotated and freshly translated edition of Kafka’s aphorisms, the Press has invited me to supply a couple of amuse-bouches from the two introductory passages to the collection, namely my Translator’s Note plus a brief excerpt from Reiner Stach’s Foreword. Read More
Essay Poems from After Callimachus April 20, 2022 In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers. Read More
