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Outbursts

From the Magazine

The Short Story Priesthood
When George Saunders first arrived at Syracuse University in 1986, he had three hundred bucks, an aging pick-up truck, and a prodigious, blond mustache. His proletarian look and habit of sleeping in the beater’s camper extension only added to the mystique of being the only ...

Far from the Maddening Crowd
In the spring of 1973, the Italian writer Guido Morselli returned from vacation to his home in rural Lombardy, where he lived alone, to a fateful letter from the publisher Mondadori. Before departing for a foray into the mountains, he sent off the manuscript of his most recent ...

California Elegy
This year much of California was ablaze, the skies in San Francisco a warm, fire-and-brimstone orange. More than four million acres burned, in fires that included five of the six largest conflagrations in the state’s recorded history. One of them, the August Complex, stretched ...

Grief’s Anatomy
I have found myself having a hard time with all of the talk about eras. The ability to rewrite history—to forget the past and pretend that the present is a unique experience, to talk about a particular moment’s violence and upheavals as if they’ve just arrived, floated in ...

The Kindness of Strangers
At the end of Moby-Dick, after the Pequod is splintered by the white whale, a coffin bobs up from the sinking wreckage, and Ishmael, treading water in the South Pacific, climbs on top of it. Over the next day, as sharks glide peacefully by, Ishmael floats “on a soft and ...

The Prosperity Hoax
November 2020
Issue No. 54
No one denies that a large number of people worldwide live in drudgerous poverty. But it would appear that we are in the midst of a historic transformation. In recent years, a spate of articles in the anglophone press and academia have suggested that global poverty has entered ...

Monsoon Dread
November 2020
Issue No. 54
In the late eighteenth century, in the Indian town of Deeg, in the desert state of Rajasthan, there was a palace garden where it rained all year round. Even on still, shimmeringly hot summer days, you could get caught in a downpour: the Jat rulers had installed copper pipes in ...

Something Cataclysmic Every Week
September 2020
Issue No. 53
It is January. Weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk at the University of Tehran. I am to speak at a program hosted by the sociology department on “The Social Thought of Muslim Thinkers.” This used to be a subject under the purview of “Religious Studies,” a kind of ...

Who Keeps Us Safe?
September 2020
Issue No. 53
A New York City march descended upon a jail in mid-June, with protesters pumping fists and waving signs at the facility’s imposing brown exterior. “We love you; we miss you; we will get justice for you,” they chanted, as cellphone videos recorded the moment outside the ...

Poetry Lessons from the Advanced in Age
September 2020
Issue No. 53
Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, I seem to remember, conjured the shape of an imperfect H. Ezra Pound claimed in Literary Essays that the lyric age (like the mathematical age) is seventeen to twenty-three, with the possibility of a second efflorescence, another ...

Meditations in an Emergency
The world, we are told, is in crisis. We hear of medical crisis, financial crisis, and crisis of leadership, suggesting that the scope of the term is almost unmanageably broad. Now these crises converge in the suspension of the everyday social order sparked by police violence ...