Facing the inescapable reality of death is not, generally speaking, good for the economy. The consumer frenzy of capitalism depends on our delaying our big moment of reckoning for as long as possible; once we start to view our property and possessions, our fashions and vehicles and even face-lifts, as temporary investments that won’t hold much value past the grave, a shift in priorities becomes necessary. And thanks to the modern tendency to extend adolescence well into middle age, many of us are only beginning to savor the more lavish spoils of the American dream when orthopedic shoes,

When Joseph Mitchell was a young boy, in the 1910s, on the family farm in remote, swampy North Carolina, he liked to watch his father remove tree stumps with dynamite. His father was an “expert dynamiter,” who would circle the tree for a long time, as though he were “trying to understand it,” before laying in the explosives. In a notebook entry made six decades after the fact, Mitchell wrote of these dynamiting sessions, “It was the first time I ever heard the phrase ‘center of gravity,’ which I love.”

“Center of gravity” is an interesting phrase to apply to the work of Joseph Mitchell. I can

In Charles R. Rushton's 1991 black-and-white portrait, Agnes Martin (1912–2004) sits in a wooden rocking chair in the left third of the frame, beside the white cement wall of her New Mexico studio. One of her canonical six-by-six-feet canvases hangs low to the ground next to her, its horizontal pencil-edge bands running out of the picture to the right. She's dressed like a plainclothes nun, in comfortable white sneakers, flannel pants, and a collared shirt under a dark cardigan buttoned to the neck. Her hands are seton each armrest with a square assurance that recalls Gertrude Stein, and the

Writing is eerie. Considered as a technique or technology, it seems almost magical: a teleportation of ideas and facts from one mind to another, via a few scribbled marks on a page. Many early thinkers were deeply unsettled by this power, worrying that writing would deform our thoughts, and society too. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates frets that writing will kill face-to-face debate and “induce forgetfulness” in learners’ souls: If you could store knowledge on a scroll, why bother committing anything to memory? The Roman philosopher Plotinus thought writing would expose you to uninformed attacks

Recently in the New Yorker, where he’s been a staff writer since 1987, William Finnegan published an article about artisan gold miners in the mountains of Peru. It begins in medias res, with Finnegan talking to one of his subjects: “Look, there are her eyes, her face, her arm, her hip,” a miner says, looking up at his mountain. “And when the snow melts, exposing more rock, the glacier turns into a skinny old hag called Awicha,” Finnegan replies. “Where the hell did you hear that?” the miner asks, and Finnegan tells us:

I’d heard it from a sociologist in Puno, down on the Peruvian

There’s a shorthand phrase in Israel for describing the politics of war and peace that permeates everything: ha matzav, “the situation.” You might come upon a conversation between two people and ask, “What are you talking about?” And the response would simply be “the situation.”

This can mean whatever happened that morning—a café blown up, olive trees vandalized in the occupied territories, or the latest proclamation of “Death to Israel” from Tehran. But it can also capture the particular flavor of a collective existence that finds itself, on a regular basis, trounced by History—an unrelenting,