Helen Andrews

I don’t know much about the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, except that I read somewhere that he gave his wife Nadezhda a pacifier and persuaded her to wear it around her neck on a string of pearls so that he could stick the pacifier in her mouth whenever she interrupted him, which apparently . . . . Continue Reading »

The article “Sex in the Meritocracy,” which I wrote for the February issue of First Things , is now online : When Yale first bowed to the spirit of meritocracy and began admitting large numbers of students from outside the New England upper class, it set in motion a nationwide arms race . . . . Continue Reading »

When Yale first bowed to the spirit of meritocracy and began admitting large numbers of students from outside the New England upper class, it set in motion a nationwide arms race among high-achieving high school students. After fifty years of escalating competition, it is no longer enough to have an SAT score in the top 1 percent and a record of achievement in a single activity… . Continue Reading »

Student production of As You Like It , Kenya 1955 Harold Bloom happened to be at Cornell during one of the most famous student protests of the “canon wars,” one in which black students went en masse into the various campus libraries, pulled armfuls of books from the stacks, and threw . . . . Continue Reading »

Aspiring writers are generally regarded as one of nature’s lower life forms, especially by established writers, most of whom seem to wonder whether the taxonomist who placed aspiring writers in phylum Chordata wasn’t perhaps claiming too much for them. From where they’re sitting, that’s an . . . . Continue Reading »

“‘An epileptic chicken,’ is how the accused described Smerdyakov.” Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home . . . . Continue Reading »

The idea of David Brooks teaching a class on the subject of humility at Yale strikes a lot of people as inherently funny, and making allowances for mean-spiritedness (and I dare say jealousy), the mockers do have a point. Humility, as a virtue, bears the same relation to op-ed columnizing as . . . . Continue Reading »

The head of the Nigerian Football Supporters’ Club, Rafiu Ladipo, has confessed that for years he has been using juju (traditional local magic) to try to bring the Super Eagles to victory. But no longer: “We came to realize that juju just doesn’t play football.” “There . . . . Continue Reading »

The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who keeps asking why Hamlet doesn’t just make up his mind already. It comes down to a certain implausibility in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Arrogant Without wading too deep into any technical lit-crit battles over the so-called death of the author, I think I can safely endorse the rule that, in general, one should not criticize a writer’s work by attacking his personal life. If an author happens to have been an adulterer, a . . . . Continue Reading »