April 17, 2026 At Work The Conundrums of Jan Morris: A Conversation with Sara Wheeler By Jamie Lauren Keiles Mount Everest. Photograph by Nir B. Gurung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Jan Morris rose to fame in 1953 as a reporter working for the Times when she carried the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest back to base camp, England, and the world on the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was arguably the British Empire’s last triumph. Over the course of the next seven decades, Morris—at that time publishing as James—traveled widely through the empire’s dwindling dominion, writing sumptuously about colonial decline and the rise of a new postwar global order. After changing her sex in 1972 at Georges Burou’s famous Casablanca clinic, she published the best-selling memoir Conundrum (1974), a finely tuned and deeply felt account of the perils and strange delights of self-creation. When the scandal of her transformation had settled, Morris resumed her literary career, writing on Venice, Hong Kong, Trieste, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, the history of Japanese battleships, and other geopolitical engrossments, until her death in 2020. Her life and work brought her into contact with many significant plot arcs of the twentieth century—not just the rearrangement of the world order but also the birth of LGBT civic consciousness. Despite this serendipitous proximity, she presents, in death, as a weak candidate for entry to any known saintly canon. Blithely humanistic, avowedly bourgeois, and often romantic to a point of equivocation, she’s suitable neither as a pride-month “trancestor” nor as a great literary firebrand. A new biography, Jan Morris: A Life—authorized by her children, who manage her estate—tries to figure out what to do with these loose ends. Its author, Sara Wheeler, is also a travel writer. She called me on Zoom with a shaky connection from “the ancient Atlantic Forest in central Paraguay,” where she was on assignment. We talked about Morris’s splintered legacy and the challenges of summing up a life. Read More
April 16, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Jeffrey Angles on “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” By Jeffrey Angles The writer in 1936. Nakahara family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255. This is one of two poems you’ve translated for this issue by Nakahara Chuya. To start, could you tell us a little about Chuya and the poem’s backstory? Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) was a Japanese avant-garde Modernist poet. Although he had a short life and career, today he is one of the best-known twentieth-century poets, remembered for his intensely personal poems and unusual, striking diction. He is routinely included in Japanese-literature textbooks, and his poems have been set to music countless times. “Memory of a Three Year-Old” is a strange little poem that first appeared in the April 1936 issue of Bungei hanron (Literary counterarguments) and was included in Chuya’s second book of poetry, Arishi hi no uta (Songs of days that were, 1938), which was published not long after Chuya’s premature death from tuberculous meningitis. The memory described in this poem seems to date from Chuya’s early childhood, shortly after he returned to Japan after a couple of months spent in Manchuria, where his father, a high-ranking military doctor, was stationed following the Russo-Japanese War. Whether or not he had a roundworm infection like the one described in this poem is a fact lost to history, but there was a persimmon tree in the courtyard of his home at that time. In a letter to a friend, dated April 12, 1936, Chuya comments that his son had recently turned eighteen months old. He fantasized about withdrawing to the countryside, where he could relax and play with his boy. It seems that thinking about playing with his son prompted Chuya to reflect on his own past. Read More
April 15, 2026 Dispatch Between Wild West and Far East By Nastassja Martin Reindeer herders’ house in Bystrinsky Nature Park, Kamchatka. Photograph by NadezhdaKhaustova, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Snowflakes whirl in the white daylight, and we advance with difficulty beneath the dense canopy. Dasho and Clint in front, me behind. Sweat drips down our foreheads. The snow crunches under our feet. Keep within the tracks! I think, every time I sink once more up to my thighs. After an hour’s trudging, bent over and with our shoulders hunched up to our ears, the landscape changes; the black spruce woods become sparser. The wind picks up as we lose the trees’ protection, and I muffle my face with my shapka’s earflaps. “Will you tell me where we’re going?” I shout to Dasho, trying to reach him over the wind’s bluster. “Nearly there,” he replies. “A little more patience and you’ll soon see.” We come out into a clearing, Dasho and Clint stop, and I follow suit. I look to the right and the left, and my gaze at last picks out a shape that’s blurry but discernible through the snowfall. Something large and white; something that is neither a house nor a tree. “Come,” Dasho says. “We’re here.” We walk towards the object, the contours of which become clear as we approach. It is a white, multifaceted sphere of imposing scale, perched on a metal structure that holds it suspended in the air. The structure must be between eight and ten meters high. At its foot, a ladder extends up towards a hatch in the sphere’s underside. I catch my breath and the boys light cigarettes, visibly pleased with themselves. “What is that?” They’re expecting my question; we have come all the way here precisely so I can ask it. “That,” Dasho says, “is America making sure the Russians can’t take Alaska back off them!” Read More
April 10, 2026 Arts & Culture Among the Antigones By Rhoda Feng Alessandra Lopez in Antigone in Analysis, March 19, 2026. Photograph by Marina Levitskaya. For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. Read More
April 6, 2026 Dispatch A Month or So, Minneapolis By Jake Lancaster Courtesy of Jake Lancaster. When Alex Pretti was shot ten times in South Minneapolis on a cold but sunny Saturday morning in front of a doughnut shop, I was likely three or four miles away, speeding down I-94 to make it to the airport before my wife’s flight to Florida. She was surprising her sister, who was turning fifty. It was well below zero and we were all very cranky, and running late. My son and daughter were in the back seat. We passed the Basilica of Saint Mary on the left, the Walker Art Center on the right. From the freeway you can see Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. I told the kids to look, but the novelty had worn off over the years: it was just a big cherry in a spoon, decorative and somewhat obscene. We passed under a pedestrian bridge designed by an architect who commissioned John Ashbery to write a poem for it. The poem is called “untitled bridge poem” and is stenciled across the structure’s steel girders and ends with the line (in what I’ve always thought to be a satisfying anti-epiphany) “And then it got very cool.” There’s a tunnel after the bridge, and everyone holds their breath until we make it through. I know my way around Minneapolis. I’ve lived here for two decades, in North Minneapolis, in Uptown, Downtown, Northeast, and South Minneapolis, and now in a near north suburb, but I still use Google Maps because there’s more than one way to the airport and there’s always road construction and unforeseen traffic and, for the past couple of weeks, the possibility of a protest or march or ICE activity blocking a major thoroughfare. Machine learning can predict these things. Most human citizens who aren’t on Signal chats or ICE watch group text threads cannot. Read More
April 3, 2026 Document The World of Aramco By Krithika Varagur Aramco World, January–February 1980 cover, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. “I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for the pure-bred Arabian horses that gave any cavalry an enormous military advantage,” writes one high-spirited contributor to a 2001 issue of Aramco World, the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. The article, which has no discernible news peg, explains how nineteenth-century Poles—like Count Wacław Rzewuski, a Warsaw aristocrat-turned-sheik, who disappeared in battle at age fifty-four—contrived to bring Arabian horses to Eastern Europe. Following in the count’s footsteps, the reporter, also a Saudi airline employee, meets Poland’s state inspector of Arabian horse breeding, enumerates the most valuable Arabian mares to “set hoof on Polish soil”—their names were Gazella, Mlecha, and Sahara—and explains how the manuscript of the “count’s account,” Sur les chevaux orientaux et provenants des races orientales, can be viewed by special appointment in Warsaw. Read More