Best of Essays

Take another look at James Salter on France and A Sport and a Pastime, introduced by Paul Yoon; revisit Damascus with Tricia Khleif as she recalls music lessons in “Abu Musa.”

 

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons

 

Best of Essays

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A coffee shop at sunset. The foreground is focused on a cappuccino; the background is blurred out of focus. People sit and talk.

I Am, I Said

DAVID MEISCHEN
Shorts, standard walking shoes. He looked like someone I might meet hiking the Shoal Creek Trail. And not give a second thought. But the glance had happened; the silent exchange had happened. The unspoken had changed me, changed him. I could see what was not visible.

Thirty-Seven Theses on Time and Memory

SVEN BIRKERTS
Why do we keep hold of certain things, and nothing of others? Now I can remember, with almost cinematic granularity, an afternoon when a veterinarian came to our fifth-grade class to dissect a white rat for our science unit.

Truck on the highway

Lightning Talk on I-90

ALI SHAPIRO
I was somewhere outside Rome when I saw the grief truck. Seriously? I said aloud, incredulous, to no one. Incredulous, and a little giddy: I couldn’t help but be delighted by signs, even bad ones; I wanted, more than any particular message, evidence of any message at all.