Notes on humiliationT he first time I understood humiliation as world-destroying was the morning I watched the World Trade Center evaporate from a street corner in Greenwich Village and found myself ...

How forests adapt to climate changeN inety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these ...

Discussed in this essay: Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. N ot long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a ...

Discussed in this essay: Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 512 pages. $35. Eliot After The Waste Land, by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

What happens when we talk to animals?W hen 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 ...

A t the turn of the nineteenth century, the publisher and bookseller William Faden was well known in London for his printing of maps. His first work of note was the North American Atlas in 1777; its ...

The ecstatic cult of Nicolas CageDiscussed in this essay: Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, by Keith Phipps. Henry Holt. 288 pages. $27.99. L ast fall, hoping to draw ...

Listen to an audio version of this article. D oes anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of ...

Against “relevance” in artB ecause these battles are still being fought, I hesitate to articulate the ways in which I think our use of the word “relevant” is distorting our appraisals of art. But I ...

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonalityDiscussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit (t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...