I tried something new today. I listened to music while walking around. I know. It’s hard to believe I’ve never done this before, but when I’m out and about, I usually like to have all of my senses engaged: the full experience. I often listen to music while riding the subway, but I take out the earbuds when I get off the train. Today, however, I left them in. Continue reading
Reflections
Falling in Love with Dante’s Divine Comedy
In his essay, “Why Read the Classics?,” collected in the eponymous volume, Italo Calvino argues that “… it is no use reading the classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love.” He adds, “It is only during unenforced reading that you will come across the book which will become ‘your’ book” (p. 6). I began reading Dante out of curiosity, but then I fell in love with an imaginative vision that dared what few authors have dared–and what no writer today would even consider. Continue reading
The Man with the Beard
I saw a man with a beard on the subway today. You don’t often see beards like that. Continue reading
Thinking about Langston Hughes
Photo by Carl Van Vechten
Langston Hughes is one of those poets whose work appealed to me as a young person–I think I was in ninth grade when I first read his poetry–and has only continued to grow in my estimation since then. Continue reading
Zora Neale Hurston on Being Black in America: Ninety Years Later
[UPDATE: I’m pleased to let you know that this essay has been published on The Columbia Review‘s website.] Commencement season at Barnard College this year will mark the ninetieth anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s graduation with a BA in anthropology. As a graduate of Barnard’s sister institution, Columbia University, I feel the time is more than ripe to reflect on some of Hurston’s contributions. Continue reading
Fantastic Quotes
Ever since I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “Fairy-Stories,” I’ve wanted to write a post about it. Then Ursula Le Guin’s new collection No Time to Spare came out, and I wanted to include some of her comments too. So far, so good, two of my favorite authors backing up several points on which I’m quite passionate. Then Continue reading
Poetry (6): A Gift of Poetry for the Bicentenary of Bahá’u’lláh’s Birth
October 22nd of this year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í Faith and the most recent of God’s Messengers to humanity–whose number includes Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, and an unknown number of other Messengers whose names have been lost. Continue reading
Youth
I have just read the most wonderful comment on youth in the introduction of a book, the rest of which I do not own and cannot vouch for, but which might be worth owning for this line alone: Continue reading
The Pornographic Gaze, Smartphones, and Virtual Experience
[UPDATE 8/10/2017] This post has drawn a great deal of attention. It seems that recording things with our cellphones is not only something we all do but also something we all feel ambivalent about at times. I almost didn’t upload this post because I was afraid it would be read in black and white. I was concerned that I hadn’t succeeded in presenting a sufficiently nuanced view. Reading the responses I received–even though they were all positive–I felt sure I had failed 🙂. Continue reading
Abandoning the Human Machine
I recently read a very informative article on the move toward an “extended synthesis” in genetics and evolutionary theory that would move beyond the notion of the “selfish gene” propounded by Richard Dawkins (see the article here). Continue reading
Ten Thousand Li 