On the Costs and Rewards of Planting Trees
I have just planted two apple trees from what my local nursery calls their “Posterity Collection,” heritage varieties grafted onto a slower-growing but durable and...
Blowing Up the Bert: The Outside Story
Two years ago I witnessed the abrupt transformation of an old and distinguished literary magazine. For the people doing the transforming, of course, the...
Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly
The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for the Southern, then the best quarterly in the country by a large margin.
A Republic of Front Porches
ALEXANDRIA, VA. Names are important, and few can be more significant than what a new publication calls itself. Perhaps at first greeting the...
On Pigeons
Two autumns ago you couldn’t take a dozen steps without tripping over the decapitated corpse of a pigeon. There’d be one lying on the...
Feeding the World from the Bottom Up
It is natural and normal, when looking at big problems, to look for big answers. Problems do not come much bigger than the subject...