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On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist
With the publication of Swann’s Way on November 14th, 1913, Marcel Proust found immediate fame. In the weeks that followed publication, a number of laudatory reviews appeared. Lucien Daudet, in a long...
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Why More People Should Read This Danish Masterpiece
In the summer of 1937, Ernst Bloch, the redoubtable German-Jewish literary critic, utopian humanist, and exile from Nazi persecution, was browsing the paper in his new home of Czechoslovakia when an...
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On Historical Blurring and the Question of ‘What If’
A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum is the story of a scientist racing Einstein to prove relativity. In the chaos of war in 1914 Russia, on the brink of solving the famous field equations, he goes...
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Einstein and the Devastating Effects of WWI on Science
On August 10th, 1915, a 27-year-old signals officer was shot through the head by a Turkish sniper. He was in the Dardanelles as part of Winston Churchill’s daring, perhaps foolhardy, plan to open a new...
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On Frank Lloyd Wright and the Architectural War For New York’s Skyline
The New York City to which Frank Lloyd Wright returned in late 1926 was dramatically different from the metropolis he had encountered in 1909, but its evolution was not a mystery. The dramatic...
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Walter Benjamin: How WWI Changed the Meaning of ‘Barbaric’
Our children’s storybooks contained the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, convinced his sons that a treasure was buried in the vineyard. They simply had to dig for it. They dug and dug but...
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Friedrich Hayek: Not Exactly the Libertarian Darling He’s Claimed As
In 1974, the Austrian-born British economist Friedrich Hayek was as surprised to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics as the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal was to have to share it with him. Hayek was...
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How the Word ‘Ghetto’ Traveled from Europe to America
One day in the 1880s, an aspiring author and recent Russian Jewish immigrant set out for the office of the New York Sun with an article he had written in his pocket. His name was Abraham Cahan, and the...
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How Tiny Hungary Made Soccer Into the Game We Know and Love
As soon as the First World War was over, the influence of Hungarian football began to spread. Almost from its beginnings, its importance was traced as much through its diaspora as through what was...
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On the Sexist Reception of Willa Cather’s World War I Novel
When Willa Cather’s fifth novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, it was divisive among critics. Reviewing the book in The Smart Set, H.L. Mencken wrote that the first half, which is about...
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C.P. Lesley and Charles Todd Talk Victorian Sleuths and the Toll of WWI
Writing novels—never mind entire series—takes determination, persistence, imagination, and craft. Charles Todd has added to those natural challenges the joys and complications of creating a single...
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Women in War: On Great Correspondents Past and Present
In the opening scene of Bearing Witness, the 2005 documentary by Barbara Kopple that examines the work of women war correspondents in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, Al Jazeera journalist May Ying...
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Syria’s Doomed Struggle for Independence After WWI
It is a commonly held idea that there is but one democracy in the Middle East. Not only is this false, but the ways it is uttered—as if the region has been one long failed blood battle for centuries...
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Why T.S. Eliot Has Remained an Enigma
In 1917, T.S. Eliot published, in a print run of five hundred that didn’t sell out until five years later, his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations. As with a lot of first books by...
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What My Grandfather Saw Photographing the 1919 Typhus Epidemic in Poland
I never saw my paternal grandfather, Joe T. Marshall, hold a camera. It was my mother’s father, Fred Spiess, the son of a German immigrant baker in New York City who’d run away at 15 to California, who...
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Pesticides, Incendiaries… How US Chemical Companies Endeared Themselves to...
American police, and Trump’s Federales, deploy tear gas to quell protestors, and thereby catalyze further unrest. Eloquent writers have explored the immorality of these police actions, including how...
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Memorializing History’s Dark Corners With Absurdity
No matter how much we might wish to, there is no escaping the monsters of our past. We might try to ignore them, or bury them, but sooner or later they always burrow their way back up to the surface....
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On the Contradictions of Whiteness, Revolution, and Freedom
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! –W. E. B. Dubois, The Crisis, May 1919 Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa. –South Africa...
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Natural Alchemy: On the Long History of Community Gardens in Indianapolis
“Urban planners and agricultural experts predict that there will be no farmland remaining in [Marion County] by the year 2050.” –William D. Dalton, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis * The 2020...
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On the Dancing Craze That Swept Post-WWI Paris
Most books tell us that it was only after the war ordeal, in a France now devastated and in mourning, that what is called the “Belle Époque” was born, out of nostalgia for what had come before. The...
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