Revisiting Cynthia Ozick’s writings on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, both included in the writer’s new career-spanning essay collection, are reminders that all Ozick’s tales feel like cautionary ones—it’s just not always clear what to avoid or how.
When it comes to 20th century intellectual power-couples, no two represented more disparate ideas about marriage and freedom than the chain-smoking liberationists Sartre and de Beauvoir on the one hand, and the neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman on the other.
The question of whether plants could have consciousness has not been left quietly back in the ’70s, as Linda Besner discovers in Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters.
Does a dream house imply a dream self? Linda Besner, hunting for a home, considers how the photography used in listings serves as a malleable, market-driven form of portraiture.
What’s the meaning of a sentence? A paragraph? Linda Besner considers the abecedarian work that makes Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries so much more than an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation.
As Barbra Streisand reflects in her new memoir, Isaac Bashevis Singer was famously grumpy about her film adaptation of his short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”. Should there even be such a thing as a definitive Yentl?
We like to believe that the clothes we wear say something about us. To understand what they actually convey, we must ask a fundamental question—what’s the difference between a costume and an outfit?
At the intersection of the public and private, the clothed and unclothed, the swimming pool has long been a favoured motif among artists and writers. But as fall settles in, what about the months when it's closed? Who are the artists of the drained pool?
