Remembering Frank O’Hara’s New York—and his generosity.
Fifty-seven years ago this month, Frank O’Hara moved into his last New York apartment, a floor-through loft at 791 broadway, across from Grace Church. As Brad Gooch describes it in his fabulous...
View Article“The Waltz”
Tonight in the park I was reminded of the first waltz I attended, dancers turning across the floor in orchestration, lights low, the beauty of being young, trying not to be, in our dinner jackets and...
View ArticleVoting is a Public Health Issue Now
After record voter turn out in 2008, resulting in the election of President Barack Obama, more than 30 states introduced voter suppression laws. And thus, the war on American voting kicked into...
View ArticleLet the World Be a Black Poem: Poetry at a Time of Protest
“Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds,” wrote Amiri Baraka in his great poem, “Black Art,” published after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the country reeling...
View ArticleIt Takes Many Voices to Find the Truth
Yesterday I stopped in at my local bookstore in London. It’s a small shop, but a good one, and seeing its doors open again was like hearing an ice-cream truck from a block away as a kid. I walked...
View ArticleDaniel Mendelsohn Makes a Powerful Case for the Art of Digression
“We all need narrative to make sense of the world,” Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in An Odyssey, his 2017 memoir about the year his father dropped in on his Homer class at Bard. The book is essentially a...
View ArticleVoting is Still One of Our Most Powerful Tools For Change
A vote is the difference between a citizen and a subject. The powerful used to be able to say to all and sundry, You must; a vote says to the powerful, No, you must listen. Thus begins, in many places,...
View ArticleHow Halldór Laxness Brings the Heroic to the Everyday
In the spring of 1927, the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness had reached a crisis point in his young life. He had begun his journey as a writer in Reykjavik in 1919, making his debut at just seventeen...
View ArticleTake a break from the news by reading about voter shenanigans in William...
As you read this sentence, voting is underway in a historic US election, a stressful contest, to put it mildly, but in this season of taking heart in the dark cackle of historical déjà vu, perhaps...
View Article“Without,” a Poem by John Freeman
Without Maybe one day I will learn how to live without, without her and her, and she and them, without him. Lately, I am mostly absence. I have lived so long within my body’s clever disguise, so...
View Article“Humanity is Not an Abstract Concept.” Lana Bastašić on Palestine Solidarity,...
John Freeman talks to Lana Bastašić, the Bosnian Serb author of Catch the Rabbit, about Palestine solidarity, missing Dubravka Ugrešić, and rejecting the “White Christian zookeepers.” * John Freeman:...
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