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September 11 looms over ordinary life in worthwhile works of fiction by Graham Swift, Mathias Énard and Ross Barkan, in this weekend's WSJ Fiction Chronicle (gift link) www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

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Nature reports that the NSF has stopped funding awardees entirely, “until further notice”. This administration is determined to destroy the country’s scientific research infrastructure by choking off funding and taking a wrecking ball to the merit review system.

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This is tonight!

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Very excited to moderate tomorrow evening's conversation between Claire Messud and Bernhard Schlink for the PEN World Voices festival. They'll discuss their outstanding recent novels and the fate of family amid war and displacement. Tickets are available, join us! worldvoices.pen.org/event/25-win...

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Hard to conceive a more disturbing headline. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/w...

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Very proud that my father, David Lawrence Sacks, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Congrats to all the new members! www.nasonline.org/news/2025-na...

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Sad to hear of the death of the amazing Jane Gardam. She was 96 - a very good age, but still very sad. I would love to have met her. What a very fine writer - one of my top favourites. #BookSky www.thebookseller.com/obituaries/a...

submitted 3 days ago • 5 comments

Very excited to moderate tomorrow evening's conversation between Claire Messud and Bernhard Schlink for the PEN World Voices festival. They'll discuss their outstanding recent novels and the fate of family amid war and displacement. Tickets are available, join us! worldvoices.pen.org/event/25-win...

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Pope Francis drew fire from conservatives and disappointment from liberals. With the conclave to choose his successor beginning next week, what kind of Church did he leave behind? Jack Hanson considers his legacy, new today in TYR. yalereview.org/article/pope...

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I wrote about my old friend Joshua Clover: elizabethmccracken.substack.com/p/so-blue-co...

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Two "Attila" novels, Aliocha Coll's dream-like book and Javier Serena's novel about Coll's novel: "there are as many missing words as excess ones, and all the words you know are excess" wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/04/two-...

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B.D. McClay with a smart and heartfelt piece (the first of four!) on the essential integrity of "trash art" and its depressing commodification thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

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On the back of an old bookmark featuring Curious George, I found a vaguely useful explanation of the logic behind the Dewey Decimal system - had no idea that it was so … Hegelian?

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For Shakespeare's birthday here's an old post of mine in which I recover a "lost" Shakesperian sonnet (genuinely): medium.com/adams-notebo...

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

The sunken man, Marco Rubio. My new column. foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/22/m...

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This is organist Olena Kohut, killed today in Sumy by the Russian missile. Joseph Rheinberger, Visione, op. 156 no. 5 💔

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Top headlines today at the Wall Street Journal. This is just the past 24 hours

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Classic Pelican 19th century history titles.

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In a 2013 interview Pope Francis spoke about his love of Manzoni and Caravaggio, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Hölderlin, etc., and of his relationship with Borges: www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/0...

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Mysterious happenings in this weekend's WSJ Fiction Chronicle--an unreliable husband awaits his missing wife in Lisbon, a New Yorker fact checker stumbles into a cult-like farmer's marker & a Mannerist painter is murdered in 1557 Florence www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

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www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

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hlo.hu/news/gyorgy-...

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"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps. This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped" snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror

submitted 17 days ago • 578 comments

The Trump admin has just detained Mohsen Mahdawi, who: –has green card –was Columbia Buddhist club president –saw his best friend shot & killed by Israeli soldier –said "we are against antisemitism because antisemitism is a form of injustice, and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"

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I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe." But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment. 1/

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"Marriage was seen as a second-best compared to the holy ideal of lifelong celibacy, and the best marriages, from this perspective, were sexless." Aaron Kyereh-Mireku reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's "Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity." openlettersreview.com/posts/lower-...

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We at the Review mourn the loss of Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025). In celebration of his life and work, we’ve unlocked his Art of Fiction interview from our archive. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2...

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This weekend's WSJ Fiction Chronicle leads with David Szalay's hypnotic and uncomfortably deterministic new novel 'Flesh'--kind of like 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' without the mysticism? www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

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Federal spending is up under Trump according to the Wall Street Journal. Chaos is not actually the same as cost savings. Actual budgeting is a kind of actual policy-making and takes real work spread over real time. Running around breaking stuff isn't that. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

submitted 21 days ago • 134 comments

The new issue of Socrates on the Beach is online, with a variety of pieces but anchored by an excerpt of Cynthia Buchanan's 1972 cult-novel "Maiden" and Steven Moore's accompanying essay on its "sensational artistry" socratesonthebeach.com

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“Mommy, no. Mommy.” Daughter captures the moment masked ICE agents smash the window of her mother's car in order to take her into custody. The government claims the 52-year old seamstress is an associate of the MS-13 gang. www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/lo...

submitted 22 days ago • 1107 comments

On April 30, as part of the 20th anniversary festival of PEN World Voices, I'll be moderating a panel on family history and migration with novelists Claire Messud and Bernard Schlink. It's at 6:30 at the New School in New York. More info here, do join us! worldvoices.pen.org/event/25-win...

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Guy Davenport in a letter to James Laughlin: “The breakthrough came when I realized that I mustn’t write about anything from my own experience, or anybody I’ve known, but to work with pure imagination, and to work with that hiatus between the mind and the world…” (October 24, 1992)

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Leslie Camhi with a strong piece on 'Sad Tiger' by Neige Sinno, who joins a "a chorus of voices that have begun raising awareness about sexual violence and incest in France" www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

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This is my contribution to the WSJ's double-barreled Spring Books issue, which has pieces on Solzhenitsyn, Assyrian writing, McDonalds, mountaineering, autism, bird sex, the Beatles, small-town baseball, anchovies and John Casey, plus this illustration by Sam Hadley www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

Going to assume now that Beethoven had a dog.

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

Wow, that is superb!

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"Not many writers have Ozick's appetite for wrestling words down on the page, making them work hard for the reader." Me on the great Cynthia Ozick's "meaty and garrulous" stories and essays, featuring Jewish levitation, a rival to Esperanto, multiple "diddlings", and TS Eliot's stadium tour:

submitted 27 days ago • 2 comments

I wrote about Paul Beatty's "The Sellout"—one of the best satires I've ever read—for Alta's 25 Books That Define California issue: www.altaonline.com/books/fictio...

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

"In early March, Marks said, Kennedy’s team requested that Marks turn over data on cases of brain swelling and deaths caused by the measles vaccine—data that Marks said doesn’t exist because there have been no such confirmed cases in the U.S." (gift link) www.wsj.com/health/healt...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments