Letter of Recommendation Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself I keep a journal of quotes, lines from songs, poetry. Nothing is my original thought — but all of it s

The moment for languid afternoons spent naming the knees and the eyelashes had passed. Our classroom was the kitchen. Illustration by Eleni Kalorkoti I moved to Geneva to be with my husband, Olivier,

“The Book of Disquiet” was found, in fragments, only after Pessoa’s death. Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Po

Kees van der Pijl is a retired professor. He used to teach international relations at the University of Sussex. He lives in Amsterdam and can be reached at

Beckett’s work is among the most enduring expressions of the absurdity and estrangement of modern life. PHOTOGRAPH BY KEYSTONE / GETTY In the summer of 1942, Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne Dec

“How to Write a Thesis,” by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason

One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist w

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastic

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a re

In the summer of 2016, I gave a talk at a small TED x conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I’ve never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people s

November 1, 2021 Español Português हिन्दी Chinese Dossier N°46 A data ‘cloud’ sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise

I never imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana, the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, and the most