by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis Golberg and Meis David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as…

by Morgan Meis We were speaking of wolves. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe the thought of wolves comes naturally when you look out across the Hudson River and see the tree line of Shodack Island. There are no people on Shodack Island, no structures. On Shodack Island, the trees and the plants…

by Morgan Meis At the moment, I’m angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I’m frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction. The first time I met…

by Morgan Meis A friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets…

The great 20th century novelist William Gaddis once wrote, “That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” Gaddis was born in 1922. He was an unabashed theorist of decline. For him, the novelist’s task…

I have been harboring a nagging suspicion about Malcolm Gladwell for some time now. There is a word that keeps knocking at the back of my mind. That word is ‘fraud’. I suspect, in short, that Malcolm Gladwell is a fraud. I finally picked up his book from a couple of years ago, Blink. He…

The following is an introduction to Péter Esterházy I delivered at the New York Public Library two weeks ago for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if…

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear And unapparelled in the woodland play. The swift hour and the brief prime of the…

It sounds like it might be a baritone sax. One note repeated over and over underneath the song. Low and nasty. The beat is driving and has a funky edge, set off by the little guitar riff looped over the top. The whole sound is there from the first note. No build. No games. Within…

He walked into the bar just after sundown. Steven Levine. His friends call him The Adorable Rabbi. Some prefer The Divine Levine. Cold outside. The kind of night you pull your coat up around your head and make like a turtle. The bartender took an immediate dislike to the Divine One. She stared at him…

It’s already been a few years since the journal n+1 published its first issue. It included a section called The Intellectual Situation. There was something bold, intellectually exciting about a group of young thinkers uttering proclamations about “the intellectual situation.” It would have seemed to many that the one thing about the intellectual situation today…

Everybody thinks that Neo Rauch is doing something special in his paintings but few know why. They can’t put their finger on it. They are, sometimes, even troubled by what they’re seeing. This is normal when it comes to Romantics. Romanticism bothers people. They don’t believe that the immediacy they are seeing is for real.…

I like to take the train from Penn Station out to Paterson. It stops in Secaucus Junction, a new and gleaming place that never seems to have anyone in it, just cavernous halls of light marble and a lonely bar tucked in one corner, the woodwork of which seems laughable and out of place and…

I can’t pinpoint the specific day or time that I fell in love with Adam Michnik. Most likely it is something that crept up on me slowly. I liked him, I read him, I liked him, I read him some more, and then suddenly, I loved him. I finally came to see all of this…

Sometime during the early part of the twentieth century the foundations were laid for a new civilization. Czeslaw Milosz once described it as being ‘behind wire’. That phrase has stuck with me. That it was a new civilization, a new way of looking at man, there is no doubt. Just what that means for us,…

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed ‘Lost in Translation’, Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They…

I was sitting for maybe half an hour in the main room of the plantation house watching an old green and white painted door swing lazy in the gusts of ocean breeze. The door was too heavy to slam. It was creeping open slowly of its own weight and then another gust of wind would…

I wrote an essay a few years ago that contained, in the opening sentence, the phrase ‘fuck you, Roger Angell’. It wasn’t out of any deep animosity toward Roger Angell, simply a momentary rage brought on by his preface to E.B. White’s wonderful book, Here Is New York. Some of the things Mr. Angell says…

Hurricanes are such powerful forces that we often anthropomorphize them, we think of them as being conscious beings. One sign of this is that we name them. We talk about where they ‘want’ to go and what their ‘intentions’ are. And perhaps nothing is more mysterious, tantalizing and intriguing than the ‘eye’ of the hurricane.…

I’m tempted to make the rather bold assertion that the most interesting duo in Western literature of the 20th century is Czeslaw Milosz and Witold Gombrowicz. I say duo because you really have to take the two of them together. When Milosz zigs, Gombrowicz zags, when you’re feeling one way, Milosz expresses it for you,…