Few memoirs have the concision, modesty, and charm that mark this late-life work by Donald Keene, America’s most renowned scholar and interpreter of Japan. As a Columbia University humanities student in 1941, nineteen-year-old Donald... Read More

The Central Intelligence Agency is a bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy that exists to serve itself and cannot fulfill its important intelligence-gathering role, which was the reason for its creation by President Harry Truman. This... Read More

“There is always a moment when the night threatens to go aground. A closing-time moment, when the bar lights go bright and you can see who you’ve been drinking with, yelling your personal details to over the noise of the band. It... Read More

Novelist and poet Phillip Lopate sets these two novellas in Brooklyn, which becomes an almost magical, tragical-comical borough as readers learn how a stoic easily deceives himself and how a husband and wife keep secrets even as they... Read More

The Middle East is unstable, war-torn, and generally hostile to the West; religious and/or civil strife, fanaticism, and militias are ever more dangerous; America is a clumsy meddler—and soaring oil prices a worldwide threat. Just how... Read More

Every ego demands clarity about itself / and the other. No labyrinth gives us clues / that allow us to decipher / where we are and who we are. *—*Carlota Caulfield “Temple of Epigrams” from A Mapmaker’s Diary (2007) Nicolas Dubet... Read More

After September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda and one of its leaders, Osama bin Laden, became household words. News organizations monitored the organization’s every move, and the media broadcast almost daily the messages that various political... Read More

Hot lights and dozens of cameras point at a Supreme Court nominee seated behind a long table. Sharp questions crackle from Senators on the Judiciary Committee and the candidates bob and weave like prize fighters. According to Eisgruber,... Read More