Activity

I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive,…

For an hour, Derrida explored various lines of inquiry, pursuing one till he reached an aporia, then switching to another

Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower o…

Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under …