“Questions of just how much reading and writing students actually do, which had hardly come up during my time in Gainesville, are uncomfortable, but they concern the essence of education.”
Ann Manov on civic centers and the future of the liberal arts.
harpers.org/archive/2026...
“Berryman’s great achievement was the creation of what Blackmur had called a fresh idiom. He twisted syntax in a fashion so wholly his own that he became an idiosyncrat on the scale of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom he revered.” —Rosanna Warren
Harper’s Magazine
“You can see the effects of this absence of information filter into the ways that scholars discuss the pictures. Some seize on context (what is known or knowable, facts external to Vermeer) as a means of shrinking the blank space surrounding his work.”
“Both at his school and at the factory, Chekhov had mastered a variety of subjects and disciplines; he did equally well at sniper school.”
From Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line.
“What dimensions has our America? I propose to offer you this antique measuring stick, with a few of my own prejudices rudely gashed in.” —William T. Vollmann
“An adventure in seriousness. This will be an ordeal. We will manifest adultism and hold our faces stern and laugh when appropriate at that which is not finally funny.”
From a new story by Padgett Powell.
“The imperial capital has many beautiful buildings, and they are always kept tidy and clean. They have a quality that grates, though. The landscape is didactic, insistent. Somebody is always trying to teach you something.” — @hooks.bsky.social
“June, Kinetic Control, Churchill Downs: The medial digital vein is torn. Euthanized where he lay.”
From official necropsy reports of racehorse fatalities in Kentucky that were compiled the advocacy group Horseracing Wrongs.
“Some people spend their whole lives fighting other people, or institutions, or fate. Then there are those of us whose greatest battles are waged against ourselves. You could argue that we are the lucky ones.” —Meghan O’Gieblyn
harpers.org/archive/2026...
