by Derek Neal

Kazuo Ishiguro often talks about a scene from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that has influenced his writing. In an interview on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in 2017, he mentions how “the narrator hides from the reader and hides from herself in the Charlotte Brontë books,” and how he also writes first person characters in this way. Elsewhere, Ishiguro mentions a specific scene from Jane Eyre where she is crying but doesn’t tell this to the reader; instead, another character in the novel reveals this information. Here’s the passage form Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester, whom Jane is in love with, is speaking to her after she believes she has seen evidence that he is in love with another woman. Rochester asks her:

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing at all, sir.”

“Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?”

“Not the least.”

“Return to the drawing-room; you are deserting too early.”

“I am tired, sir.”

He looked at me for a minute.

“And a little depressed,” he said. “What about? Tell me.”

“Nothing—nothing, sir. I am not depressed.”

“But I affirm that you are; so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag.”

Rochester continues for a few more lines until the chapter ends, with Jane not saying anything else or commenting on the conversation. She is hiding from the reader and, as Ishiguro says, from herself, but the encounter with Rochester reveals her true feelings for him. In being forced to confront the world outside one’s head—the objective world, rather than her subjective one—the truth she would seek to repress comes to the surface.

Ishiguro most famously used this technique in The Remains of the Day with the butler Stevens, another character who spends the novel hiding from the reader and from himself. Read more »

Just a Little Time

Just a little time with you
upon the gleaming sea

Just a little time will do
and the time will make us free
And yes, the sky is our bed tonight

Just a little company
can make a prairie small

And to hear a word or two
resounding down the hall
can lift the weight, can swing the gate

Just a little time with you
will tip the hand of fate

Jim Culleny, 1972
The song: Just a Little Time With You_0001.wmv

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by William Benzon

I didn’t see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when it came out in 1982, but I was certainly aware of it. It was an unexpected smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, at least for a while. At this point I don’t remember why I didn’t go to see it. After all, I’d enjoyed Spielberg’s previous film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Whatever.

I certainly knew the basic story: A weird little alien gets left behind and is befriended by a young boy. They do stuff together. Somehow the alien sends a signal back home – there’s that iconic line, “E.T. phone home.” His people come back for him. The end.

About a week ago I saw E.T. in my Netflix queue and thought, “Why not?” I started watching it. By about a half-hour in I was delighted, but also surprised, and even a bit disoriented. My rudimentary sense of the story didn’t give me any particular expectations, but my lack of specific expectations had not prepared me for, you know, THIS! This little note is an attempt to figure out just what it is that I saw.

Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On Yom Kippur this year, I went to church.

I hadn’t intended to go; or rather, I hadn’t noticed that the Jewish Day of Atonement would coincide with the date of the performance I had been planning to attend, and which was to be held in a church. I had realized just two days earlier that the Übersetzeressen (“Translators’ Dinner”), to which my employer had invited all of us in Languages Services, would by chance fall on September 30, International Translation Day, which is also the feast day of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators. And so, heartened by this serendipity, I started investigating the significance of other dates during the same period, and came across Yom Kippur, which began this year at sundown on Wednesday, October 1, just as I was settling into my pew at the Reformierte Kirche Russikon for Winterreise.

Anna Gitschthaler, an Austrian soprano based in Switzerland, has thrillingly reconceived Franz Schubert’s song cycle as theater and has been performing it this month, together with pianist Rebecca Ineichen, director Adela Maria Bireich, and set designers Erika Gedeon & Stefan Schmidhofer, in Zurich’s Oberland. Gitschthaler is of course not the first to give Winterreise a dramaturgical makeover, nor is she the first female singer to perform the 1827 setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, conventionally sung by a man: I have written here about some innovative stagings, by Ian Bostridge, Brigitte Fassbaender, and Joyce DiDonato, as well as about my own involvement in a “gender-bending” performance of the cycle two years ago, with my colleagues Annina Haug and Edward Rushton. But Gitschthaler’s Winterreise is indeed a pioneering production—of Müller and Schubert’s evocation of suffering and redemption, as well as in its own right—because it makes self-conscious use of the sacral space of a temple as the (literal) staging ground for a work of musical theater, and thus innovatively enacts the equivalence of art and religion, if not in fact the superiority of the former over the latter. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn’t used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I’m not really sure what flip was switched. It’s not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we’ll be happier, but how ridiculous it is to expect anything to stay the same at all, much less get better, ever. And that understanding seems to help reduce some anxiety over the things that can’t be easily changed. Suffering is inevitable, but it can be somewhat diminished in order to have more contentment. We can change what counts as suffering, and we can change our perspective around tragedies, so maybe we can also change how we can continue to bear witness to, or experience, absolute atrocities. 

One simple way to reduce suffering is to narrow the definition. Comedian Michelle Wolf jokes, “It’s hard to have a struggle and a skin care routine,” which clarifies that we might be considering some difficulties as suffering in a way that doesn’t fly when we widen the scope of our horizons. Pain is pain and can’t definitively be compared, yet I believe many of us have an automatic judgment in our heads that lists events in a hierarchy. Typically suffering from having to do a task we don’t want to do, like write a boring report or clean out the fridge, or from wanting luxuries we can’t afford, like another trip, might be relegated to the bottom as whining. The pain from it is there, though: the agony and stress from uninteresting maintenance that’s necessary to further our own existence or the grief over lost opportunities. Furthermore, it can develop an extra layer of shame on top of the suffering if we try and fail to elicit sympathy for having so much food that some is left to rot and needs to be cleaned. When we realize we can’t afford that trip after all, this is a suffering we are expected to bear without complaint. 

The shame on top of the very real distress doesn’t help, but a different perspective might: comparing to those worse off, recognizing the tasks as merely one choice with alternatives that are even less pleasant, or maybe even finding ways to enjoy the task or staycation are ideas passed down for millenia. If we can increase our distress tolerance around these lesser calamities, then we can potentially wipe out the bottom layer of our pile of pain.  Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

“We have to develop Singapore’s only available natural resource, its people,” Lee Kuan Yew often said in one variation or another.

Lee, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, held the role for 31 years before his “emeritus jobs” of Senior Minister and later Minister Mentor – staying active in Singaporean government until his death in 2015 at 91 years-old. Throughout his life Lee reminded Singaporeans and the world that Singapore had been not much more than a dusty red sandbar when it began – dependent on water from peninsular Malaysia and unable to meet its own agricultural needs.

Singapore’s economy was transformed from being centered around shipping, trade and a British naval base to being diversified to include more profitable and scalable industries including manufacturing, finance, software and biotech. To do this, Singaporeans had to be able to move into white collar jobs – which of course required education and lots of it.

Accordingly, education became an early focus for Singapore’s leadership. Most of Singapore’s founders were themselves graduates of the greatest schools in the British Empire – including Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics. But they were the products of highly successful families who could afford to send their sons abroad (although notably, Mrs Lee also attended Cambridge and became a highly successful attorney in her own right – making her a pioneer and icon in Singapore). These leaders understood their country needed education not to be concentrated in the elite – but to be the standard for all Singaporeans. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In Timur Vermes’ best-selling novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s back’), Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin. Somewhat disoriented after discovering the year is 2011, he soon finds his way to the public eye again: he is understandably regarded as a skilled Hitler impersonator, an excellent ironic act for a 21^st-century comedy show. His handlers don’t mind the fact that he never breaks character.

Clips make it to YouTube, and the ‘Führer’ becomes a beloved persona. After humiliating the ineffectual leader of a far-right fringe party, he is assaulted by skinheads. Politicians express their sympathies, a book deal follows. The novel ends with its main character at the head of an up-and-coming party, whose slogan is: Es war nicht alles schlecht – “it wasn’t all bad”.

Vermes puts Hitler in a Germany that believes it is finally able to laugh at him, or at itself through him. Commercial media encourage his popularity, which at first seems tongue-in-cheek but gradually turns out to be more than that. The country is unprepared for his literal-minded and violent racist madness – and for the traction it subtly gathers, the threads in our own discourse that it starts to pull on again. Everyone thinks they know Hitler, but fails to recognize him when he is among us now.

I thought of this story again as I read historian Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie’s thesis is that after the Second World War, the Atlantic and European world placed Hitler at the center of the Western value system (as its negative mirror image). This went at the cost of another historical figure, whose return we have similarly stopped expecting: in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jesus had represented a moral authority that was deeply felt not just by Christians, but also by free-thinkers and atheists. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazism became the new moral absolute. This model lasted for decades, but Ryrie discerns a new cultural shift, one that is happening now. With the age of Atlantic hegemony, the ‘age of Hitler’ is coming to an end too. What lies beyond it is still up for grabs. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

The Lakota name for Wounded Knee Creek is Čaŋkpe Opi Wakpala. The first letter is a -ch sound. The ŋ signifies not an n, but nasalization as when you say unh-unh to mean no.
*
When I teach Indigenous history, at the beginning of the semester I tell my students they’re going to have unlearn things they think they know. By the end of the semester, they are often astounded at how much they didn’t know.
*
Wounded Knee Creek begins in southwestern South Dakota, near the Nebraska state line. It flows mostly north and a little west for about a hundred miles before joining the White River. The White River, which originates northwestern Nebraska, continues mostly east and a little north until it reaches the Missouri River. The Missouri starts in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and runs for nearly 1,500 miles before joining the Mississippi River near modern day St. Louis. The Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana.
*
On December 28, 1890, the U.S. Army, specifically the 7th Cavalry, slaughtered an unknown number of Lakota (sometimes called Sioux) people near Wounded Knee Creek. The exact number is unknown because the corpses were buried in a mass grave without being counted. However, no one disputes that the majority of murder victims were women, children, and the elderly.
*
I teach my students about settler colonialism. White ethnonationalists and some other right wing extremists get upset when teachers and scholars teach and discuss settler colonialism. But it is a real and ongoing process, just like capitalism and cultures. Like capitalism and cultures, settler colonialism is a system, not an event, though like other systems, it produces many, many events. Read more »

Guess what this is, sitting on a counter in my office.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

1. Roses

Miniatures and illuminated manuscripts from the Islamic world offer up an abundance of floral depictions. Cultivating gardens and replicating them in art, has a spiritual dimension, as gardens symbolize paradise; “Jannah” in the Qur’an is a “hidden garden” that inspires to be revealed and realized in the creative arts. Gardens have a place in the realm of earthly power too; from Spain to India, some of the most elaborate garden designs were commissioned under Muslim rule. In portraits of princes and noblemen, there is often a sprig of flowers or a single rose in one hand, slightly raised, whereas the body is angled to show the regalia: jewels, sashes and belts with daggers or swords. While a flower in bloom in an imperial image may symbolize vitality, refinement, and a concern for balancing the fierce with the tender, the true poignancy it evokes lies in its vulnerability and inevitable decline.

A famed ghazal verse captures a most spectacular swing of empire’s pendulum: the end of one of the wealthiest and culturally most opulent empires in history, the Mughal empire, whose dominion over large swathes of territory in South Asia was wrested from it by the British Raj. As he lies dying in exile (1862), the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar writes:

How hapless is Zafar, for his burial

Not even two yards of land could be found in the beloved’s neighborhood

Some of his most finely wrought poems are in the Sufi vein, exquisite verses that stand apart in the Urdu cannon. I would if I could, bring roses as homage to his resting place, left unmarked, in Burma where he died.

While the king yearns for two yards of burial ground in the land his ancestors ruled over with such pomp for centuries, the British Empire, though destined to be short-lived, is fast expanding, and by the nineteenth century, comprises nearly one-quarter of the world’s land surface. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Michael Liss

… I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism (Je m’en foutisme) in its people. —William L. Shirer, The Collapse Of The Third Republic

“Do you think America’s political system can still address the nation’s problems or is it too politically divided to solve its problems?” 33% said “can still address”; 64% “too politically divided.” —Results of a nationwide New York Times/Siena poll of 1,313 registered voters conducted from Sept. 22 to 27, 2025.

Let me take you back 10 years, to the fall of 2015. An email from a good friend, the type of person America doesn’t manufacture anymore—both a scholar and an international businessman, multilingual, connected to an array of influential institutions and people, and a moderate Republican.

He was writing just after the November 2015 Islamic State-sponsored Paris and Saint-Denis terror attacks, which left over 100 dead and 400 injured. The breakdown in civic culture was part of his concern, but it wasn’t the only one. He was profoundly worried about the startling rise of Donald Trump. He wondered if we in the United States weren’t also turning toward the anger, the xenophobia, and the dysfunction that characterized the discourse in 1920s and 1930s Europe. That was the atmosphere that brought then to a Hitler and a Mussolini, the “confusion, hopelessness and cynicism” in France that Shirer wrote of. Could it happen here?

For context, Trump had entered the contest for the GOP Presidential nomination on June 16, 2015. In his announcement speech, he mentioned economic themes like deficits and offshoring of jobs, but also pounded (with explicit, highly charged language) on illegal immigration and the threat of Islamic terrorism. Deficits and immigration were standard topics for any Republican, but Trump wasn’t “any Republican”—he was on his own island, launching what seemed a vanity candidacy by a man with a potty-mouth who sprayed people and entire ethnic groups with insults. His opponents scorned him, advertisers distanced themselves from him, and odds-makers were positive he had almost a negative chance of winning. Public polling seemed to bear them out. A June 2015 NBC/WSJ Poll had Jeb Bush in the lead at 22%, Scott Walker at 16%, Marco Rubio 14%, Ben Carson 11%, then six others (Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie) …. and, in 10th, the last position to qualify for the first GOP debate, Carly Fiorina. Not a Trump amongst them. There was something Trump did excel at—he was soundly rejected by the Republican public—16th out of 16 to the question of “Could you see yourselves supporting this candidate or not?” at a formidable minus 34%. It wasn’t that the Republican voter didn’t know Trump. They did know, and what they knew they didn’t like.

But Trump had found something most of the major Republican candidates, conservative commentariat, and the media, had missed. His inflammatory language, which they saw as crude, un-Presidential (and they hoped) disqualifying was heard as a beat to quarters by others. Trump might be a blowhard, but at least he didn’t sound like a lawyer or a professional politician. All those guys did was talk, and for all the rounded, consultant-tested phrases they laid out like tapas on a tasting menu, it was Trump, with his ill-mannered vitality, that got through. Read more »

by David Winner

In an interview with Ezra Klein about LGBTQ rights, Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of congress, talks about a “sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.”

I don’t know about that, but before the 2024 election and its tremendous blowback against rights of all but the narrowest sector of humans, tolerance for the LGBTQ community did seem to be at an all-time high.

A cultural time capsule, this writing relays some bizarre conversations about queer issues from long before, the 1990s.

Though I’m a straight cis man, I’ve been fortunate enough to land in queer-friendly worlds, and queerphobia has not been among my pantheon of character flaws. When I encountered milder forms of sexual harassment – persistently tongued in the ear by my friend’s drunken boyfriend on the J train platform just after college, fending off an aggressive Puerto Rican doctor at the gay male end of Jacob Riis beach a few years later – I was neither aroused nor disturbed nor disgusted. Just mildly annoyed.

My odd sartorial choices, my quirky mannerisms of speech often registered as gay when I was younger.

That misidentification started happening all the time after I began teaching at a community college in Journal Square in the 90s, a rough and seedy part of Jersey City. Female students tended to leave me alone, but some of the boys were out for blood, the gay blood that they assumed was mine. A dumb essay that I assigned, simply urging men to be more sensitive with no queer implications, was riotously mocked. Read more »

Hayv Kahraman. Rain Birds Ritual, 2025.

Oil, acrylic and flax on acrylic.

More here, here, and here.

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by J. M. Tyree

Morgan Meis and I have been talking about art for years. We’re friends and interlocutors, so I’ll refer to him by first name here for the sake of transparency. Morgan writes about painting; I write about movies. We spent the pandemic exchanging letters with each other about films by Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. These letters were later collected in a mad book called Wonder, Horror, Mystery, in which we spent 366 pages arguing like two flannel-wearing Gen X oldsters sipping lemonade on a porch.

I like reading arts criticism that is personal, not too heavy, and accessible to non-specialists, written in a style that is a little bit more intellectual than most American journalism and magazine writing, but a little less jargony and a little more fun to read than academic monographs. Maybe it is possible to dream of creating a form of arts criticism that is itself art. Hardly novel in itself – on the contrary, this idea returns criticism to certain old ways of writing about the arts, and makes a mess of the contemporary academic divisions between criticism, scholarship, and belletristic writing. This book does all of these things.

What Morgan has to say about art makes the world a more interesting place when one reads books like The Grand Valley, the last volume in his trilogy about paintings. The trilogy started with Rubens (The Drunken Silenus), continued with Franz Marc (The Fate of the Animals), and has now culminated with this new book about Joan Mitchell. Apart from Mitchell I strongly dislike the painters Morgan has selected for his triptych. Actually, Rubens is much more interesting than I previously thought, I realized, after reading Morgan’s book, and going to look at Rubens’s terrifying paintings in Munich (which are truly creepy and hellish). I still hate Rubens. Marc does nothing for me, to be honest. Among Mitchell’s paintings Morgan has selected the series of canvases entitled La Grande Vallée. Finally, things were looking up for me as a reader!

Joking aside, the preceding volumes in the trilogy are very compelling reads worth exploring and mulling over, but the trilogy is designed so that each book can be read separately and the reader won’t lose the thread. More generally, I love the idea of a trilogy of arts criticism books – in this economy? – for its simultaneously high-minded and intentionally ridiculous impression of self-mocking and self-serious moves. Refreshing. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sixty-five years ago this month, the John Coltrane Quartet entered Atlantic Studios in Manhattan for three days of recording sessions, over the course of a week. It was the first time the band recorded together. The four musicians  — Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones, McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums —   remarkably produced enough material for three albums, and then some, in those three sessions. Some of the recordings are jazz classics —   “Equinox,” for example, a Coltrane blues composition. Others include beautiful renditions of standards like “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Summertime,” and “But Not for Me.”

These three sessions involved intense, concentrated work by musicians at the top of their game.  But in just the second song they recorded, on the first day, lightning struck in one take. On Friday afternoon, October 21, 1960 these four men recorded “My Favorite Things” — 13 minutes, 46 seconds of pure transcendence.  My Favorite Things (Stereo) (2022 Remaster)

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this recording, but it’s got to be hundreds. And after having listened to it so many times, I still can’t describe it in any way that really does it justice. It’s just ineffable.

Most people associate the song with Julie Andrews. She sang it in the movie version of “The Sound of Music.”  My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music (Official HD Video)   But that movie only came out in 1965.  “The Sound of Music” started out, of course, as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It was based on the story of the real-life von Trapp family, as described in the 1949 memoir of its matriarch, Maria Von Trapp. It was first performed on Broadway in November 1959, with Mary Martin as Maria.

In October 1960, then, and even in March of 1961 when the recording was released, “My Favorite Things” was not the chestnut it is today. But Coltrane decided to try it. The version the quartet recorded is entirely different from the original cast recording sung by Mary Martin, or the later movie version by Julie Andrews, both of which are prim and perky. Read more »

I am reaching for your hand once more
and realize it always . . .

………………. —could  be  now

by Jim Culleny, 10/3/25

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by Christopher Hall

What does it mean to turn somebody into an object, either literally, by killing them, or in a more conceptual sense, by robbing them of freedom of thought and action? This, according to Simone Weil in her celebrated essay on the Iliad, is the central topic of that poem:

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form – the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. (Mary McCarthy’s translation)

A thing that has a soul. Is this not a rather routine definition of what a human being already is? In one line of thinking, a human being is an object, and no amount of force is needed to make this so. We are the same kind of stuff as rocks, clouds and black holes, even if one feels Weil would very much balk at this description, and insist that the human being, properly understood, is no sort of object at all. Why insist that force makes us into this “extraordinary entity” otherwise? Force may exercise the majority of its workings on the human object, but its ultimate goal and function, in Weil’s view, is an attack on the subject. Unless we are of the opinion that such a subject doesn’t actually exist – and there are plenty around who are – then force does indeed enact something terrible on the human being, whether we subsist, at least in part, as objects or not.

But what does that entail, exactly – the transition from subject to object? Read more »