Publishing since 2016.
John Woods spent four decades teaching and writing in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earning the admiration of major poets while remaining relatively obscure to a general audience. David James, a former student of Woods, argues for rediscovering the poet’s bitter, wry, and deeply original voice.
Jack Conroy emerged from the Great Depression as one of the leading “worker-writers,” chronicling the lives of laborers while resisting pressure from the Communist literary establishment. Andrew Careaga revisits Conroy’s life, work, and place in the largely forgotten proletarian writers’ movement.
After decades away from poetry, Erika Zambello challenged herself to read 100 poetry books in 100 days. What began as a literary experiment transformed how she spent her time and experienced everyday life.
Also in Essays
William F. Buckley Jr. helped build the modern American conservative movement. Yet, as Henry George argues, Buckley’s great tragedy was not the content of his ideas but that he sought to defend a social order whose foundations had already crumbled.
In Zayd Ayers Dohrn's book, he recounts his childhood as the son of two prominent members of the Weather Underground. Allen M. Hornblum considers what draws young activists toward revolutionary violence—and contrasts that path with those who pursued social change nobly and peacefully.
W. D. Ehrhart remembers Joseph T. Cox, the Army colonel, poet, and headmaster of The Haverford School whose friendship restored his teaching career and transformed the last three decades of his life.
“The words on the page do not come with built-in instructions for how to resolve their own ambiguities.”Stuart Doyle — The Oldest New Idea
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Suzanne Sherman recalls her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia, a notoriously difficult illness to treat. Roughly five percent of those diagnosed die by suicide. For some patients, though, the remedies can be almost as painful as the underlying disease.
Insofar as Germany seeks to prevent the AfD from becoming nationally dominant, the political center must take more seriously the degree to which many people living in the former East Germany feel overlooked by and alienated from the western part of the country, argues Gerfried Ambrosch.
Tony Njoroge, who worked as a teacher in a Samburu community in Kenya, reflects on the practice of child marriage that robs so many young women of the chance to cultivate their talents and build lives of their own choosing.
Below the fold
Nathan Cofnas, who has catapulted to international renown amid the Jason Arday controversy, is a scholar whose work is difficult to dismiss—and who may have more staying power than his critics anticipated.
Longtime Mississippi education advocate Rachel Canter reflects on the difference between shaping policy from within a community and doing so from afar—and the vital accountability that can get lost along the way.
Balancing an ambitious career with twins seemed possible until it no longer was. Katie Trexler, a former morning news anchor, examines the quiet trade-off associated with motherhood and the desire to honor both family and self.
Peter Clarke explores the divide between people who apparently experience a constant internal monologue and those who do not. In doing so, he asks what this difference might mean for friendship, romance, personality, and the way we move through the world.
W. D. Ehrhart, a frequent contributor to this magazine's poetry section, reflects on grief and loss following the death of Beanie, his family’s beloved cat of nearly twenty-two years.
Channeling Tolstoy's 1886 novella, Robin Greene, who has now turned seventy-one, reflects on aging, mortality, and meaning.
Erich J. Prince argues that critics of zoos too often mistake today’s conservation-minded institutions for the barren cages of the past, overlooking the species modern zoos and aquariums have helped save from extinction and their role in fostering a love of animals.
Simon Maass traces the enduring influence of Austria-Hungary on modern intellectual life, arguing that the empire’s admirers have often drawn precisely the wrong lessons from its history.
Further Reading
