The office administrator would have thought I’d lost my mind if I’d turned in all those receipts. I hid them from her and ...

The lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, ’What are you going ...

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light ...

June, 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on mule back in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the inner Mongolian ...

An epilogue. 10:35 P.M. I spot Amelia and Anne in the crowd walking back to the ferry. Amelia thinks that Stepan Trofimovich must really have been supposed to look like Marx: when he was dying in ...

And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame. W.S. MERWIN: I think this is probably the greatest sonnet Wyatt wrote, and I think it's one of the greatest sonnets in English. I've known it for so many ...

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down ...

Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven’t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city or in Brooklyn without thinking of the dancing ...

May 21, 2025 – "I want to talk about Valencia’s achievement in transmitting the conjoined rush of being young, being high, ...

This is the second installment of Nadel’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY THREE I realize this journal is meant to be cultural, but I swear, a ton of my daily doings are more like the ...