I first encountered the biological concept of population in high school. We were introduced to the experiment of flour beetles in a jar of flour; each week, we ...
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“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ATHE
Theater theorists, historians, and practitioners gathered in Orlando for this year’s annual meeting of ATHE, the Association for Theatre in Higher ...
In the Moment, On the Edge
What was literary impressionism? It is not an easy question to answer, since literary impressionism was less a movement than a sensibility. The impressionist writer ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who ...
Machines Like Me, But They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve ...
QUIZZICAL: Can You Match the Lock of Hair with Its Author?
Both the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the ...
Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...
Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...
Samuel Delany on Capitalism, Racism, and Science Fiction
Samuel Delany was 20 when his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, appeared ...
How Does Copyright Matter?
Copyright as we know it is a surprisingly recent development. It has been with us just a few decades—only as long, roughly, as Hello Kitty and the Star Wars ...
Inside the Map: On Two Novels by Pola Oloixarac
One of Jorge Luis Borges’s most enduring fictions is the one-paragraph story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”). Structured as a fragment of ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
Summer Reads: Pan-African Literature
To celebrate Africa Day, May 25, Zimbabwean information project Kubatana curated its top-10 titles from Exclusive Books’ Pan-African Writing ...
Another Mormon Education
The first sentence Tara Westover writes in her engrossing memoir Educated is a disclaimer: “This story is not about Mormonism.” This is true in the same ...
The Breaks of History
Ralph Ellison once suggested that “living with music” provides us with “an orientation in time.” Music, in other words, helps us locate and anchor ourselves within a history that exceeds us. Living ...
A History of Reading: Alan Marshall and Helen Keller
On May 9, 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action ...
