Hope is not a simple “denial” of reality, but something that is painstakingly cultivated. Part of the struggle for hope involves a shift of perception in light of changing circumstances.
Pain and grief are among our most private, isolating experiences.
Should we be as concerned about equality of outcomes as we are about equality of opportunity?
The author’s interpretive framework truncates the narrative by forcing her to see thick cultural issues only through the lens of social class.
The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Given that most Americans now assume that children are priceless and fragile, it is no surprise that many have striven to remove all risks they might face.
A controversial campaign in 2013 aimed at teen pregnancy in New York City.
The marketplace has infiltrated intimate life and transformed the self.
Poverty research has become caught up in a paradox of its own making—of diminishing insight into the problem of poverty amid more data about the poor.
Herbert Hoover’s US Food Administration did more than simply change Americans’ eating habits.
A human person is a historical being, in whom the past remains immanent in the present, and whom the wear and tear of time enhances rather than diminishes.
A grotesque and caricatured version of Simone Weil undermines an otherwise good book.
The ideal mother, as countless novelists have known, is a dead one.
How are we ethically to evaluate the practice of getting stoned?
If being sensible was no virtue to my father, being fantastic was just as bad.
When you bring children into being, you give them the gift of life, but you also impose on them these terrible costs.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
Awareness is not the opposite of ignorance. Rather, it’s a stand-in for performative gestures of all kinds.
Is love so discrete and impregnable that it can subsist in the midst of the most repellent undertakings?
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
Why precisely are the most fortunate of us the most restless? How can our private, individual restlessness explain our public, political sclerosis?
We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.
Defenders of abortion might more wisely reframe their case around the central importance of care.
Television is a paradigm that frames all visual communication as entertainment.
Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?
More and more, our lives happen there, on the screens of the bleeping little tyrants in our pockets.
For many tech billionaires, citizenship is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.
At the climax of this progress into the inner depths of the mausoleum, a glimpse of Lenin himself suddenly appeared before us.
The young will be formed. The question is how.
The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder.
Today, the “college experience” centered on a residential life that promises to envelope students in a warm, intimate community has hardened into something more totalizing than even the blundering late-twentieth-century project of enforcing political correctness.
The Claphamites unquestionably launched a revolution in manners that shaped what we have come to know as Victorian morality.
Calling the idea of wilderness into question makes as much sense as asking whether the United States is a democracy.
It’s nice to think that a gift like that possessed by Ella Fitzgerald will always find its way. But luck matters too.
How did we reach the age of the average, and what did it mean for American democracy?
Cutting anti-natalists down is one thing, but building up the left’s case for children is more difficult.
The COVID crisis has changed our perceptions of assisted living communities, perhaps permanently.
A lesson in what it takes to be a father, and why a kid might want to have one.
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.
Austen’s sparing use of attributions is also a sign of her confidence in her art. She dispensed with unnecessary scaffolding.
I remember hearing the news and thinking that this was going to end badly for everyone. I had no idea just how bad things would get.
Anne Sexton is familiar with the dark night of the soul felt in the body.