Statement of Record
Most risks have immediate consequence. If you get caught in a riptide, you drown. Not that afternoon, not the following month, but then. But if I catch a dribble of Covid sputum on Lookout Hill, I may wake up one morning two weeks later not with one of the mild sore throats that have been scaring me but a deep exhaustion so I can barely make it to the bathroom to pee. A...
The invisible enemy hit Italy just as I was preparing to leave Florence; containment measures had begun a week prior to my departure. At first the “red zones” of Codogno and other municipalities in Lodi were subject to quarantine, then the whole of Lombardy together with provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, and Marche. And then, on...
“Israel doesn’t have problems. Israel has challenges,” the speaker tells our group. It is my second day in Israel. The program that brought me here required us to come to his lecture. The speaker is American. He immigrated to Israel in the 1970s and established a kibbutz outside of Ramle, a medium-sized city (for Israel) about thirteen miles...
A piece of tissue-thin onion-skin paper to which you pressed your vermilion-inked seal, and so sealed my fate. Belying the fragility of the parchment, it is an iron-clad document that “releases” me—as if I were a prisoner or a caged animal—from the mother who wanted me and the motherland that did not, to cross the great, roiling ocean to call another, “Mother.”
On Inception, Gaslighting and Trump/Russia: Or how Dirty Rubles Connects the Dots on a Story You May Think is Confusing, But Really Isn’t So Confusing After All.
...my life is not supposed to be like an apocalyptic science fiction movie. But it has been. The past, the present, and the future co-exist in Tehran.
(Sorry, hippy bros, but your calls for "peace" and "love" aren't helping all of the women who know how it feels to be held down by your "peace-loving" friends.)
Wang Ping’s Ten Thousand Waves is the telling of the migrant explorer’s story for survival. Packed with voices of the dead, Ping’s book reminds the reader how sacred each laborer’s life is in the face of unjust labor practices. Each person is more valuable than their labor, even when multinationals, banks, and political institutions act otherwise when...
Nevertheless, something like a baleful pollen in the air—a ghost pollen, impalpable rot, enveloping decay—suddenly became active with mysterious design, opening what was closed, closing what was open, upsetting calculations, contradicting specific gravity, making guarantees worthless.
Fifty-six years later, James Baldwin's words remain true: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you."
Every person is his secret. If you take this away from him, his integrity is ruined. Human beings cannot live without secrets. These manifest early in the secretiveness of a child who guards his hidden “treasures,” who has his secret language and secret writing, who communicates in signs and drawings.
Some folks will dismiss Mr. Walser as a critic. They will say he sorely failed, that he confused his genres, mixed his fiction with his nonfiction, and got his tongue tied up by double-dipping into the real and the unreal. In a word, by being ekphrastic in his criticism...
Statement of Record