My grandmother proposed to my wife months before I did. They’d just met the day before, but Grandma, a no-nonsense New Englander, never wasted time on subtlety. “So Andrea,” she said when I stepped out of the room, “are you ready to join this family?” “I…I don’t know,” my startled girlfriend responded. “Why not?” shot [...]
A century ago, the Great War tore European civilization apart. The self-confidence and self-regard with which European nations had conquered and colonized great swaths of the globe in the Modern Age collapsed amidst death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. Darker and more virulent incarnations of arrogance and ambition would rise from the ashes of [...]
In 1808 Hendrick Aupaumut—a Mahican leader and former captain in the Continental Army—wrote to Thomas Jefferson of his people’s struggle to find a “Sure habitation” in the rapidly expanding new nation. Captain Hendrick’s story is immediately recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with United States history: We were compelled to move from place to place… [...]
A Hero of Our Time by Mihail Lermontov (trans. Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov) “Perhaps some readers,” Mihail Lermontov writes as his proxy-self narrator, “will want to know my opinion of Pechorin’s character. My answer is the title of this book. ‘But this is wicked irony!’ they will say. I wonder.” Vladimir Nabokov [...]