I wrote a forty-to-fifty-page treatment, which no one ever saw, of how the opera would unfold. And then I got that down to fifteen pages, which the composer saw, and then ten pages, which the ...

Sometimes the recognition of self and other is uncanny, even disturbing. In 1903, a criminal named Will West arrived at ...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica ...

Have all been fought and won. In a very short time, now. This war will be done. So I order my men. Children, actually, and far from home. To fight and die for nothing. We don't want no more of your ...

I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a ...

the castigations and the bountiful.

Have you seen this video of a three-year-old weeping over Justin Bieber? It became an Internet phenomenon, culminating in Jimmy Kimmel flying the toddler to his show so she could sit on Bieber’s lap.

below and above them with pink.

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too ...

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, ...