Category Archives: New York

“A Vigorous Young Man”

Good writing is a rare commodity in law school, as in the legal world generally.  Mercifully, there are a handful of judges who are a joy to read. One is Benjamin Cardozo, who was on the New York Court of … Continue reading

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On O’Neill’s Netherland

I finally got around to reading Netherland, and I enjoyed it a great deal.  I also read Zadie Smith’s somewhat-negative take on the book in her New York Review of Books essay of three years ago, “Two Paths for the … Continue reading

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Naphtha beguiles

In his poem “Naphtha,” Frank O’Hara catalogs the 20th century from the perspective of the mid-century. (I’m not sure exactly when the poem was written; O’Hara died in 1966, so sometime in the 1950s or 1960s.) It’s a century of … Continue reading

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A Spy Retired to the Country

Like the Millennial man who favors brown worsted vests and a sculpted moustache, Jesse Ball is of the wrong age at just the right time. A poet and novelist—though, from what I can tell, mostly novelist, these days—Ball is a … Continue reading

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Aragorn does Eliot

From a New York Times editorial on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as app: Another touch guides you to voices reading the whole poem aloud, including Eliot the poet and Viggo Mortensen, the “Lord of the Rings” star. There is … Continue reading

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