In December 1866, mathematician Mary Boole wrote to Charles Darwin: Do you consider the holding of your Theory of Natural Selection, in its fullest & most unreserved sense, to be inconsistent,—I do not say with any particular scheme of Theological do

In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act

STEVEN G. KELLMAN’S books include Rambling Prose, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, and The Translingual Imagination. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. —Emily Dickinson I had been asleep for a few hours when the policeman a

Emily Bernard is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in

Since her death in 1959, Billie Holiday’s life has inspired artists, filmmakers, and biographers, whose efforts have contributed as much to her legend as her unique voice and exquisite musicianship have contributed to her artistic legacy. Paul Alexan

Marie Arana’s sprawling portrait of Latinos in the United States is rich and nuanced in its depiction of the diversity of “the least understood minority.” Yet LatinoLand is regrettably old-fashioned and out-of-date. For starters, Hispanics aren’t rea

To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described play as the engine of creative growth in children. In its earliest forms, play takes place in the presence of the mother, who provides a “holding environment” for the child. Hide-and-seek is a model for the

SUDIP BOSE Editor BRUCE FALCONER Executive Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Senior Editor JAYNE ROSS Associate Editor ELLIE EBERLEE Assistant Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor SALLY ATWATER Copy E

CASSANDRA GARBUS is the author of the novel Solo Variations. Her fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, American Short Fiction, Texas Review, Meridian, Louisiana Literature, and The Cortland Review. Lily slumps on the living room couch, absorb

"Shakespeare’s Sister” is an oblique reference to Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which the British writer imagines that the Bard had an equally talented sister named Judith. With little opportunity and few protections, Judith

Security confiscated the bracelet I’d slipped into my wallet but not the thin black sweater I wore as I walked out of Macy’s. The sweater still had its price tag and was so soft it soothed whoever was whispering “more, more” in my ears adorned with s

By law, no building in Rome’s city center may exceed the height of St. Peter’s Basilica. Its immense, distinctive dome towers above the city’s Seven Hills, dominating the horizon from as far away as the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, nearly 25 miles to the

When Daniela Rus tells people what she does for a living—designing artificially intelligent robots at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—“they generally have one of two reactions,” she writes. “Some get anxious and … want to know when the robo

Jeremy Bentham scorned polite society but loved his London cats, even the pasta-eating swashbuckler Sir John Langbourne. Life with Langbourne led to feline character-study (“His moral qualities were most despotic—his intellectual extraordinary; but h

"Oh let me, let me kill them,” one woman cried, a knife in one hand, a rasping file in the other, as she struggled with the soldier trying to restrain her. “They killed my husband. They burned my house and child. Oh, let me through.” It was November

Toward the end of my mother’s life, when she couldn’t carry on a conversation, I took to singing for her. She lived in a group home for people with dementia in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. I live in Brooklyn, and even before the pandemic, I vi

When Netflix released the docudrama miniseries Queen Cleopatra in May 2023, controversy quickly arose around the casting of Adele James—a mixedrace English actor with Jamaican ancestry—as Cleopatra. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued

In 1972, Suzanne Lacy, Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgel, and Aviva Rahmani staged a performance during which women dipped their naked bodies in metal vats of eggs, cow blood, and clay, then were wrapped in sheets, while the audience listened to an audiotap