Summer 2008

Articles

Exhortation

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

William Deresiewicz

The best universities have forgotten their true purpose

The End of the Black American Narrative

Charles Johnson

A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present

Intimacy

André Aciman

Revisiting the gritty Roman neighborhood of his youth, a writer discovers a world of his own invention

Pullovers

Kyoko Mori

Knitting a new life in America after a mother’s suicide, long ago in Japan

Her Own Society

Brenda Wineapple

When Emily Dickinson and her radical friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson met for the first time

The Bout

Blair Fuller

When George Plimpton, the boyish editor of The Paris Review, went three rounds with the light-heavyweight champion of the world

Buoyancy

Willard Spiegelman

The art of swimming isn’t hard to master

Fiction

Happy with Crocodiles

Jim Shepard

Symbols

Sheila Kohler

Poetry

Confluences of Sound and Sense

Langdon Hammer

Kay Ryan’s idiosyncratic approach to the commonplace

Six Poems

Kay Ryan

After Callimachus

John Talbot

Arts

Grand Horse Opera

Richard Locke

The best Westerns celebrate our history and criticize the ugly stereotypes of the genre

Syncopated Clock, Indeed

Janet Frank

On Leroy Anderson’s centennial, a defense of the popular composer from an orchestra’s stage