Old English Has a Serious Image Problem
Although studying the language known as “Anglo-Saxon” helped women advance in the academy, the subject is fraught with racist associations.
Stanley Fish’s Academic Clickbait
The “renegade” scholar Stanley Fish is really a bit dramatic.
Melville’s Confidence Man Today
Does Herman Melville's 1857 novel The Confidence-Man have anything to tell us about our present day? Philip Roth thinks so.
Gabriel García Márquez: Off in the Clouds
A 1987 interview with the author of the beloved books One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
A Novel Defense of the Internet
Novel reading was once regarded as an idle occupation, just as Internet use is now.
The Original Hawks and Doves
Where do the terms hawks and doves come from? The symbolic connections are ancient, but the War of 1812 put them in the political lexicon.
The Drag Aesthetic of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes' poetry was influenced by the drag scene in 1920s Harlem.
The Other Orientalism: Colonialism in the Caucasus
For centuries, the Caucasus was to the Russian Empire what the Middle East was to the British and French: a savage land to be dominated and a romanticized Other against which Russia could define its own “European” identity.
The Temple of Apollo on the Ocean Floor
In 1993, divers discovered a shipwreck from the Hellenistic period off the coast of Turkey. It held marble columns from the Temple of Apollo.
“Let the Traumatic Image Haunt Us”
When tragedies strike, it is through photographs, rather than think pieces and reportage that the reader can see the sheer scale of the problem.