“I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.”

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on the modern subject’s self-theft

On his journey home, Merrill adapts to the conventions of the upper-class in hopes of carving his own place within it.

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on an eight-mile journey through backyard swimming pools

On Virginia Woolf’s thirty-third birthday, she and Leonard Woolf made three significant decisions over tea: they would purchase a house in Richmond, acquire a bulldog named John, and buy a printing press.

Reanna Brooks on The Hogarth Press

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in May 2024 on our modern life.

Either humanity, and thus each and every human, has dignity in its current state, or it, and by extension we, can never claim to have, or give, dignity.

John P. Slattery offers a genealogy of eugenics

For all its parallels to Christ’s passion, The Old Man and the Sea is no allegory but something deeper, a tale which reveals how suffering may be spun into wisdom.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on Paschal elements in Hemingway

Though Beef does not end with a “born again” moment, it points us to the hunger for one.

Elizabeth Stice on two artistic windows into ourselves and our times

Beef draws attention to the hamster wheel of our America today.

Elizabeth Stice on two artistic windows into ourselves and our times

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in April 2024 on our modern life.

Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work.

Xiamara Hohman on Mei Lanfang’s effect on Marianne Moore

Every spoken word was a pilgrim, in some sense, passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

Lauren Spohn ponders death from the dentist’s chair

Is it possible to critique secularism in a thoroughly secular age?

Ali Harfouch on alienation and the sublime

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in March 2024 on our modern life.

Entering the Pickle was also an unusual experience… a fact that the inscription “Step high, speak low, and leave your dignity behind” emblazoned on its front door… cheekily acknowledged.

Elysia Balavage on a bohemian pillar of the Chicago Renaissance

McLuhan sees our modern, technologically induced condition as a product of tensions between individualism and tribalism.

Éamon Brennan contests a standard reading of Marshall McLuhan

Scruton, looking at our days “sub specie aeternitatis,” even thinks that this time of decay gives us an opportunity to work on the behalf of religion, morality, and culture that “no previous generation has been granted, and which no future generation may desire.”

Julian Kwasniewski reviews Against the Tide

[T]rue liberal education aims at a holistic understanding of truth, a universal knowledge in which, as Saint John Henry Newman puts it, all branches of learning connect.

Kate Whitaker on her liberal arts education

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in February on our modern life.

Lunn’s story illustrates the reality that one need not choose between being a “modern” and “classical” mountain enthusiast or between being an inventor or follower of tradition.

Margaret Sutton on the “something else“ we find in the mountains

David Morrison offers a scientific deep-dive on networks of change