Washington power players are engaged in a relatively new high-risk sport: the game of breaking things.

It was perhaps inevitable that the critic, editor, classicist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn would take on a translation of the Odyssey. After all, he has already written a book (in part) about it, An Odyssey, A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017). In that volume, as Mendelsohn is preparing to teach a semester-long seminar […]

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“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you? There are many thoughts that would never have come to me if I hadn’t been writing. What surprises me most is how, when I’m writing a story and I have no idea […]

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A warm May evening at Athens in (perhaps) 411 BCE. It is the night of the festival of the goddess Bendis in the Piraeus, and a dozen men have gathered for dinner at the house of Polemarchus of Syracuse, a rich shield manufacturer. The party is a cosmopolitan one: resident foreigners (“metics”) such as Polemarchus, […]

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Why do readers return to John Berryman’s Dream Songs? The first volume, the Pulitzer- winning 77 Dream Songs (1964), chronicles the thoughts and observations of a troubled, often lustful character called Henry, sometimes thought to be a stand-in for Berryman (although he asserted that Henry was “not the poet, not me”) in seventy-seven poems, most […]

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For a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s – John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch – the term New York School, borrowed from the label given to some abstract expressionist painters, never made that much sense. Over time, it has made even less. There was never any “school” as such, […]

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California Highway Patrol officers are chasing a suspect driver in Los Angeles County Wednesday night. The suspect was initially wanted for driving the wrong way. Sky5 is overhead. The developing story will be updated.