Spare the Children!

There is much about this story that is profoundly troubling and it is worth contemplating--both in its Biblical and Qur'anic versions. One of the best conclusions to be drawn from it (in either version) is that God willed an end to human sacrifice. And yet, human sacrifice goes on in multiple ways: "literal" human sacrifice--through militarism, through poverty, through profit-driven systems of healthcare, through hunger that we have the resources (but not the political will) to eliminate. If that is what is meant by taking such a story "literally," I wish more people took it that way.

Happy Eid!

Edmund Wilson

One of the 20th century's most accomplished readers.

Peoples of the Book

Melville and Hemingway

Melville and Hemingway: poets of the irresistible vortex that is the Deep, the surface of which we blithely skim in our daily lives, ever onward towards a receding shore…



When you've read the first few pages of Death in the Afternoon, you can be forgiven for asking yourself, “Am I really going to wade through a book on bull-fighting?” This question is analogous to the one you ask yourself when you’ve read the first few pages of Moby-Dick: “Am I really going to wade through a book on whaling?” The temptation at that point is to put the book down. But that is the moment in which you prove your mettle. Hemingway’s book is not Melville’s—for one thing, it is not self-consciously a work of fiction and, therefore, is tethered to the pale truths that emerge from the world of fact. So it is disadvantaged in the comparison, and your expectations should be fitted to the genre. But what he does with that genre is to elevate it, as far as possible, to the fictive realm of Myth. And therein lies its greatness. It is a study of tragedy, which is to say, a meditation on what it means to be a human being.

Perhaps the Time has Come to Wear it in Defiance

Here's the history.

Here's the present: Trump's dog-whistle to the Fascists.

Anoushka Sankar

Death in the Afternoon

After putting it off for decades, I started reading Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon several years ago (2016 maybe?) but had to put it down when duty called. I've picked it up again and, this time, won’t put it down for anything. It is an astonishing work—looking death straight in the eyes. Hemingway, Rimbaud, and Jim Morrison had that in common but Hem lasted the longest. The secret is not to flinch and this book doesn’t flinch.

Hemingway’s stock has fallen in recent years because what is alleged to be his machismo has dropped from fashion—but this popular impression (like so many) is the result of lazy caricature, not careful reading. Hemingway was about courage, not testosterone. And in the final analysis, it is the rampant fear and denial of death in our culture that lies behind the willingness to dismiss his art on “high moral grounds” (which are rarely, if ever, either high or moral).

The other day, a friend of mine said, “When you get right down to it, American culture doesn’t involve much more than video games and masturbation.”

We’ll do anything but face up to the nature of our predicament as human beings; the same holds true for the consequences of our actions. We seem to be trapped in an eternal adolescence. Look no further than the man in the Oval Office and his "base" (holding steady at 4 out of 10 Americans).

Henry Miller Recalls and Reflects [Interview 1956] (2/9)