Anecdotal Evidence

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem ...

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in respo...

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The...

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in ord...

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ i...

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, ...

I spent Thursday morning in the hospital having a nuclear stress test performed. It’s a painless, time-consuming procedure made pleasant by ...