Latest posts
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The House of Atreus: The Curse That Became Greek Tragedy
No family in Greek myth is as thoroughly damned as the house of Atreus, and no curse in the literature does as much work. It begins with a man who tried…
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Gatekeepers of Fascism: How Authoritarianism Gets Normalized
Authoritarian regimes are not, in the modern era, usually built by authoritarians. They are built by the people who were supposed to stop them. This is…
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The Brontë Sisters: One Family, Seven Novels, and a Myth
Read on its own, Wuthering Heights looks like a book that fell out of the sky — a work of such concentrated strangeness that it seems to have no…
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The Greek Underworld: What the Dead Taught Odysseus
Halfway through the Odyssey, the most resourceful man in Greek poetry does the one thing no living man is supposed to do: he sails to the edge of the…
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Karl May’s Orient Cycle: Old Shatterhand Goes East
The strangest fact about Karl May, the most widely read German author of the past century and a half, is that he wrote with photographic confidence about…
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The Art of Rhetoric: How to Win an Argument the Classical Way
Watch any televised debate to its final seconds and you will see a curious thing: a candidate who has been thoroughly refuted, whose figures were wrong…
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Cranford and the Comedy of Small-Town England
There is a moment early in Cranford when a cow, having tumbled into a lime-pit and lost most of her hair, is dressed by her devoted owner in a flannel…
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Monsters of the Odyssey: Cyclops, Sirens, and the Map of Fear
Trace Odysseus’s voyage home on a map and you get nonsense: a Mediterranean stretched into a fairy-tale ocean where an island of cannibal giants sits a…
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D. H. Lawrence: The Body’s Truth in Four Major Novels
At the close of Sons and Lovers, a young man walks at dusk toward the lights of a town, away from the house where his mother lies dead, and the novel’s…
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Political Violence in America: A Long, Recurring Shadow
On the morning of July 11, 1804, the sitting Vice President of the United States rowed across the Hudson to a ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey, and shot the…