Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings | The New Yorker
The writer’s painstaking attention to the smallest units of language scales up to momentous questions about how errors of communication shape human relations.
Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins | The New York Review
A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs.
Ben Lerner’s Long Search for Contact | The New Yorker
In “The Lights,” the writer flickers between prose and verse, life and fiction, and the earthly and the alien, hoping to bring each closer to the other.
Thoughts on Notes on the Anniversary of 9/11
Here’s the annual link to what I thought about 9/11 back in 2012. I might write it differently today but I still feel that way.
It’s worth noting, I think, that COVID has killed far more people here in New York City (and around the world) than the 9/11 attacks, and isn’t through with us yet. But even COVID, or perhaps especially COVID, has spread as it has from neglect and a failure to react by a government whose election and appointment grew out of the fear implanted by 9/11.
One consequence of this fear is a perilous distrust, mangling, and confounding of information and its sources. Another is a perilous belief, in the form of retreat and denial, that we can control or evade the other consequences of the attacks on behalf of our own privilege, entitlement, comfort, and self-interest. We are stoned on this and dying from it.
San Francisco Stoop
Staple Street (Detail)
