Confronting the Worse: Writing & Catastrophe
I have been a roaming correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for a long time, have seen many catastrophes, and have often had to write about them. There… More
Confronting the Worst: Writing & Catastrophe
I’m not somebody who, like a combat photographer, stands up when there’s shooting to get a better picture. I wait until it’s just calm enough perhaps to have a… More
Home & Away
Dorothea Dieckmann on Home & AwayWhen home is where you come from, aren’t you always away? On all your ways you want to come home again, trying to find… More
Dracula Is a Pain in the Neck and So Is “Self-censorship”
My brother’s favorite game was “strangle.” As I remember the rules, he would pretend to strangle me, and I, so happy to get my older brother’s attention, waited till… More
A Fahrenheit 450 Story
This is a Fahrenheit 450 story, only hot enough to burn my butt, no blazing tale of the censorship wars. While heroic writers speaking truth to power face secret… More
Avraham Ibn Ezra (c. 1093 – c. 1167)
With the departure of Yehuda HaLevi for the Land of Israel and, several years later, the first wave of invasions by the North African Almohads, the Golden Age of… More
Yehuda Halevi: The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain
Poems from The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, (Princeton University Press).Translated from the Arabic by Peter ColePeter Cole is the recipient of… More
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol (1021/22 – c. 1057/58)
Philosopher, misanthrope, and spectacular fly in the ointment of the refined eleventh-century Andalusian-Jewish elite, Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, the second major poet of the period, comes down to us as… More