Opinion

Shortly before dusk on Nov. 3, 1870, Laura Fair approached Alexander Parker Crittenden as he sat with his wife and three of his children on El Capitan, a San Francisco-bound ferry. The newspapers described Fair as a mysterious woman who wore all black as if dressed in mourning. She had followed Crittenden onto the ferry. […]

When W.G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, he was eulogized by the Anglophone literary world as the author of four singular novels. Artfully fusing fact and fiction and interlarded with grainy and blurry photographs, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz revolve around real-life characters […]

A young friend of mine called me up the other day. He is in the venture capital business and feels he has reached what young people call “a career plateau.” Maybe he has, though in my experience, people his age — he’s about 30 — have outsize ideas about where they should be in their […]

My brother Rick and I grew up in a time and place ideally suited to the formation of lifelong baseball fans. The time was the 1950s and early 1960s; the place was Pomona, California, just a bit east of Los Angeles. The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958; I had my 10th […]

“To mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself,” the Columbia University linguist, prolific author, columnist, and podcaster John McWhorter emphasizes in his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. “Pronouns are used so frequently, […]

In 1816, John Keats wrote in his poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” that when he encountered George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, it filled him with limitless excitement. As he put it, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” It is, unfortunately, more likely […]