SOMETIME IN THE MID-14TH CENTURY, the Dominican friars of Pisa commissioned a series of frescoes for the Gothic portico that enclosed the city’s cemetery, the Campo Santo, or Holy Field, a landmark as striking as the neighboring cathedral and its fam

Sandy Ostrau’s landscapes often convey a sense of loneliness, yet her California Golden Hills (oil on canvas, 48"× 48") is also full of seductive warmth. In this painting, she says she tried to capture the “shapes, colors, and feel of summer in the h

LATE ON A MID-JUNE NIGHT, I stood barefoot in the yard between our house and a field of prairie forbs. Around me fireflies blinked greenish yellow—hovering, dodging, or posing on stems. The night before, they had drawn me to the window. Now, although

WORD IS OUT ON THE STREET: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf either. Or not much of it. There are reasons to listen to the auguries. Most of the teaching in English departments no

THE THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY burst into public awareness when observations made off the west coast of Africa during a 1919 solar eclipse confirmed one of Albert Einstein’s most astonishing assertions: that large masses, like the sun, warp space a

I met her on a bus riding down a narrow winding road somewhere in Italy, I think between Sorrento and Naples, or perhaps between Amalfi and Sorrento. I had slept badly the night before, and the morning was foggy and cool. It was a small bus, and its

Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave” (Summer) is one of the best articles I have read on the subject of slavery. It took me back to the late 1940s, when, as a young African-American boy growing up in Florida, I would listen to my paternal grandmother

IT’S OCTOBER 2019, in the Time Before, and I’m standing on Hadrian’s Wall, high atop a scarp overlooking the green hills of Northumberland. Thick, scattered clouds cast shadows on a land so vast, it feels like the world will march on forever. Little

“MY LIFE IS A TANGO, my heart a Grand Guignol,” declared Max Jacob in his poem “Romantic Allusions to Mardi-Gras.” He could have listed many other such contradictions. Born in Brittany in 1876 to a secular Jewish shopkeeping family, Jacob was a conve

In 2012, Matika Wilbur, a member of the Swinomish and Tulalip tribes of Washington, launched Project 562, her effort to photograph the 562 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States. (That number has since grown to 574.) She env

IN THE OLD DAYS OF VAUDEVILLE and burlesque, standup comics weren’t the only speakers to take to the stage. Another breed of noble performer also stood and delivered, sometimes presenting serious monologues, sometimes simply talking. A few of these a

HENRY DAVID THOREAU liked to compare himself to a rooster whose crowing wakes his neighbors, calling them back from sleep to an awareness of the present. “We cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment

FOLLOWING DONALD TRUMP’S election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that first dr

IT WAS A BRILLIANT BIT of branding a few years ago, when scientists began warning of an “insect apocalypse” or “insect armageddon.” As a rule, very few people care about or pay attention to insects, but the idea that insect populations were crashing

WITH CORONAVIRUS STILL AT LARGE, we are witness to the further fortification of an edifice I thought was already invincible: the Standard Approach to medicine and public health. In the Standard Approach, poor African-American (and increasingly, Hispa

MUSICAL GENIUS AND bombastic bigot, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is a cultural Rorschach test. Whereas Thomas Mann saw in him “the greatest talent in the entire history of art,” Friedrich Nietzsche, once a fawning disciple and family intimate, asked: “

IN 1786, JEREMY BENTHAM was visiting his younger brother, Samuel, an engineer overseeing the laborers on one of Prince Potemkin’s Russian estates, when he learned about his brother’s invention of the panopticon. Samuel’s idea was to create a circular

SINCE LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA’S musical became a Broadway sensation and made the 1804 Burr-Hamilton duel “of the moment,” the field of Revolutionary and early republican American history has found itself caught in the crossfire. For those who prefer it th

IN HIS SUCCESSFUL 1980 CAMPAIGN for the White House, Ronald Reagan proclaimed himself a “sagebrush rebel,” indicating support for a movement spearheaded by some libertarians and livestock operators who sought to transfer ownership or, at least, effec

THE WAR OVER Western Sahara might be the world’s least-known long-term conflict. For more than four decades, an ethnic Sahrawi state-in-exile has been struggling, without success, for international recognition while waging a daily battle for survival