America existed then only as a smattering of fledgling colonies, of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the most prominent. As its first governor—elected in 1629 shortly before leading its settlers to the Americas—Winthrop was proud of his colony. But his message was not self-congratulatory or self-promoting; it was cautionary. If the Puritan colony failed morally, it would fail publicly. Those with wealth and power, he warned, were obligated to attend more to others and less to themselves. Or, in his words, “more enlargement toward others and less respect toward ourselves and our own right.”

Winthrop then quoted a Hebrew prophet who called on people “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.” He said “we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together”—that is how we will live peacefully in society. Living as a city on a hill was a kind of communal test, and the world would take note of whether we passed.

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Maybe that’s why I, a millennial who grew up in the oft-idealized 1990s, find it so moving to read this short poem by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, a court poet from 12th-century Japan. It perfectly captures the mood of wistful nostalgia that has pervaded so much of life for people of my generation. Here’s my translation of Kiyosuke’s poem:

If my life is long,

Will I remember these days,

Even these, fondly?

That lost world I suffered in. . . 

I look back on it with love.

It’s a tanka, or “short song,” a form that dominated Japanese verse from the 7th to the 12th centuries. Like its more famous cousin, the haiku, tanka proceeds in short verses with a set number of syllables each: five, seven, five, seven, seven. Because it’s so spare and simple, the art is in placing each word for maximum impact, so that a vast emotional landscape opens up within a tiny space. The more you run your mind across it, the more texture you find.

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Or so DuBose Heyward tells us in his classic 1939 picture book, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. A book for children, yes, but like all good children’s books, it’s also a book for the parents who read it to them.

It was never my plan to have a child before 30. My mother, my grandmother, and the mothers of pretty much every kid I grew up with in Manhattan were well into their 30s when they gave birth, and my friends and I assumed we would follow suit. Career now, family later.

But then I married a man 25 years my senior and started to rethink the timeline. At 27, I’d submitted my dissertation at Cambridge, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, and had been profiled in The New York Times in an article with the print headline “The Aspirations of Solveig Gold.” Two months later, though, those aspirations moved to the back burner. I was pregnant.

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I didn’t know what the Cold War was, but I knew the Soviets were the bad guys. Everyone knew that.

Still, you could certainly make an argument in the early 1960s that there was no particular reason to conquer space other than scientific curiosity. Some people did make that argument. But President John F. Kennedy understood that it was more than that.

On the one hand, he knew that a serious space program was meaningful for our competition with the Soviet Union. “With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn . . . ,” wrote Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in his biography of Kennedy, “the dramatic Soviet achievements . . . were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific preeminence particularly.”

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The premise was simple: A teenage girl constructs a second, public-facing identity to preserve her authentic self. For 8–12-year-old girls like myself, it was as fantastical as it was captivating.

The show gave us scenes we could only dream of: your crush parachuting out of the sky in a tuxedo to profess his love for you; a rotating closet; a choreographed dance number to get your class out of detention; and a glittery Y2K Malibu Barbie lifestyle. And at the center of it, a girl with enormous energy, a Tennessee twang, and a face so warm and expressive you couldn’t look away. Every line was delivered as if the director had just said, “Now for this one, go as big as you can.”

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There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that Theodor Herzl, on his way to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, carried under his arm the novel Daniel Deronda, by Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot.

Whether or not the story is true, the association is apt. We live in a time when the debate over Zionism has been crushed into a rhetorical bloodbath, when even some Jews have lost sight of the definition of the word. Amid the noise, Eliot’s novel captures the moral and emotional beginnings of a movement that now both captivates and enrages the world.

But first, let us backtrack. You might think, given how large a part university campuses play today in the dissemination of anti-Zionism, that there would have had to be some reckoning, between marches, with George Eliot’s pro-Zionist fervor. But that’s to give away my age. A well-read student body can no longer be assumed. Still less a student body that is familiar with the works of George Eliot. And even where the name of that greatest of Victorian novelists rings a bell, her politics vis-à-vis the Jews don’t.

Would it matter if they did? Well, it should. Every ideology has a history, and it is crucial, if we are to be intelligent and informed about ideas we find abhorrent, that we understand their origins, their onetime necessity, the hope they once inspired.

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On January 18, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ordered the printing of an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the signers, so that each of the states could put the founding document into its archives. It was the first time that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.

The lawmakers were meeting in Baltimore because British troops were in New Jersey, and getting close to Philadelphia, “the seat of war” and the nation’s then-capital. Baltimore was the home of Mary Katharine Goddard, the first female postmaster in the United States. The printing shop she had inherited from her family was just a few blocks away from the new Congress. Since the move south, Mary Katharine had printed a number of resolutions and notices for Congress, so when it was time to quickly print the country’s most important document, they called on her.

In just two weeks, she gathered the names and printed copies, and sent them to the 13 colonies. Earlier versions of the Declaration had circulated without all the signatories’ names to avoid British detection. Printing the version with nearly all the signers’ names was an act of defiance and extraordinary bravery.

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Today, instead of alerting us to a rhythmic rustling in the underbrush that could be just the wind but could also be a knife-wielding member of an enemy tribe, apophenia is mainly a means of telling ourselves stories—imposing narratives, theorizing conspiracies, chalking up to destiny or devilry what some would see as random happenstance. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both shot in the head, in the presence of their wives, by assassins with 15-letter names? Did you know that if you start playing Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon at just the right moment during the opening credits of The Wizard of Oz, an eerie synchronicity emerges? Did you know that The Simpsons predicted 9/11?

To search the art of the past for harbingers of the present is a precarious enterprise; it’s all too easy to see something prescient, sinister, or supernatural in the imaginings of a previous decade. It is more precarious still to do this in search of narratives that not only predict the future but confirm our biases, political or otherwise, proving we were not just right but on the right side of history all along. We know this. We do it anyway.

Which brings me to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a contemporary Western-cum-noir about a beautiful vampire whose hunting ground is an Iranian ghost town called Bad City. I saw it at the time of its release in 2014 and found it visually stunning but narratively unexceptional. But amid the ongoing unrest and violence in Iran, and in the wake of a U.S. military campaign that left the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead—and his 36-year regime hanging onto its authority by a thread—I had a sense that it might make for an interesting rewatch. What I didn’t expect was a number of moments so bizarrely prophetic that they made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

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There’s a particular story my wife likes to tell. It comes from those early days of our relationship, when every glance carried meaning, and even brushing hands felt electric. We were out for Thai food one night, lingering longer than necessary in the easy Palo Alto air. She was in the Bay Area for graduate school and I was chasing the Silicon Valley tech start-up dream. Midway through dinner, the playful banter gave way to something more serious. I looked across the table and said, without irony, “Just so you know, I plan on moving back to New Hampshire one day. If that’s a deal-breaker, it’s better to say it now.” I had spent my childhood climbing the white mountains and swimming in the clear waters of Lake Winnipesaukee. I knew that one day, I wanted my kids to have the same experiences that had profoundly shaped me.

Luckily, she wasn’t scared off by long winters or my complete lack of tact. Still, our path back to New England took a few detours. Three years after that dinner, we traded Northern California for a seven-year stint in North Carolina for more graduate studies and start-up adventures. We were there, in March 2020, when the world abruptly shut down. Schools and churches closed. Restaurants went dark. Working remotely became as common as a glove compartment full of masks. Like everyone else, our lives were upended. The everyday connective tissue of friends, co-workers, and community thinned almost overnight. Above the chaos of it all, I felt a pull toward home.

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I was on my way to the gym when I heard of James Van Der Beek’s death Wednesday at the age of 48. It was not a surprise. I knew he was fighting cancer, thanks to my enduring obsession with the teen idol from my adolescence.

The premiere of Dawson’s Creek in 1998 was the first time I ever hosted a watch party. I was 17 and invited my friends over to my parents’ basement. Not the kind you see all over social media now, with tasteful light fixtures and wainscoting, but one from a different time, with a broken-down Naugahyde sofa, a flickery Zenith set, and exposed ductwork. It was a place to hide teenagers away, and we were happy to snag snacks and settle in for our delectation at the hands of The WB, a new network that became known for its “beautiful angsty teenagers maybe having sex in beautiful nostalgic Americana landscapes.”

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Will we ever need to write an email again? What about make a restaurant reservation? Go to an office? Drive a car?

When the story of the last few years of global technology is written, it’s hard to imagine that it will focus on anything other than how tech—and artificial intelligence in particular—removed all friction from our lives: a Claude to text everyone for you; a Copilot to build slide decks at work; a ChatGPT to save you a trip to a therapist. On the surface, it sounds great. A million little daily annoyances evaporated into nothing. A door opened to the kind of smooth life where everyone can focus on what really matters.

But what if that’s not actually what we need? What if we lose something when we outsource all our annoying jobs to the machines?

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My ninth-grade English teacher, Mac, was appropriately English. He favored tweed jackets, sweater-vests, and tortoiseshell glasses, and spoke in a very Merchant Ivory voice—which he frequently used to emphasize to the class that the poetry of a handful of white European men from distant centuries represented the pinnacle of Western literature. Poetry, Mac said, in the exactitude of its language and form, held the key to the exquisite beauty of the literary promised land.

Mac was a great teacher, so I trusted him. But I could not untangle the words of Lord Byron and John Keats. “Lethe-wards had sunk” wasn’t the kind of phrase that made me want to know what Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” was trying to tell me. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I liked to read and write stories that had a narrative arc. Poems generally left me wondering why the sentences were randomly diced up; if they were even sentences at all. And so, for many years, I believed that until I found a way into the lyrical mysteries of classical poetry, I’d be forever deprived literarily, and a lesser writer for it.

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It was a scorching afternoon in late July 2023, and I was wandering through the deserted ruins of Caesarea, the ancient Roman capital of Judaea—today, a stunning national park in Israel. As I walked, I recited a poem: that of a young woman who had been executed by a firing squad nearly 80 years earlier, during the Holocaust.

Her name was Hannah Senesh, and she spent her early adult years in the very area I was walking. As a young woman, she wrote poems inspired by the beauty of her new home. Her most famous poem, written in 1942 when she was 21, is called “Halicha L’Keisarya” in Hebrew—or, in English, “A Walk to Caesarea.” Here it is in English:

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Didn’t Martin Luther King Jr. have someplace better to be on April 3, 1968, than Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a sanitation workers’ strike?

Not really.

By then, King was almost five years removed from his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. His powers were waning. The civil rights movement was waning, too. The Vietnam War had shattered the liberal consensus for King’s proposed civil and economic policies, and protests in American cities were erupting in very un-Kingian violence. In a private phone call recorded by the FBI, King told one of his friends that he felt as if no one was listening to him anymore. And he was right: When asked in a Gallup survey how they felt about King, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they disapproved of his activities.

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In 1914, Jewish teenager Jacob Glatstein immigrated from his native Poland to New York. There, he joined a thriving community of Yiddish poets and co-founded a literary magazine, In Zikh, a journal devoted to “introspectivism,” to filtering poetry through the prism of the self. This was the type of expression available only in America, where national and international political problems became temporarily less urgent for the immigrants fleeing them.

But by the 1930s, the dual threats of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union were reaching fever pitch. This period, which Winston Churchill described as “The Gathering Storm,” was even more ominous for Jews. When pogroms erupted in his native Poland, Glatstein published a poem, “Good Night, World,” dated April 1938 and here translated by Marie Syrkin. Its opening was startlingly aggressive.

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Among my prized possessions is a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s nonfiction The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 by Britain’s Left Book Club. It’s not much to look at. No illustration or artwork adorns its faded orange limp-cloth cover. The spine is split and stained black, as if with coal dust Orwell picked up while he researched the book, in mining regions of industrial northern England.

Still, I treasure this beat-up volume for its searing description of life among the ill-paid, socially marginalized workers upon whose backbreaking labor the entire British economy depended, and for whom Orwell expressed respect, bordering on awe.

“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working,” Orwell wrote, after a harrowing visit deep underground. “It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”

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We’re used to a certain Christmas aesthetic: warm, domestic, sentimental, festive. The imagery traces back to 1848, when an etching was published of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their children in front of their decorated tree. Today, your living rooms may be littered with the modern evidence of this tradition: trees adorned with ornaments; oranges stuck with cloves; leftovers filling the refrigerators; extended family members lounging about the couches before traveling back home.

This spirit brings light to the holiday season. But, of course, the theological drama of Christmas began long before the Victorian era.

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When I learned on Wednesday that Norman Podhoretz, the longtime and legendary editor in chief of Commentary magazine, had died at the age of 95, I immediately downloaded Making It, the autobiography he published in 1967, when he was all of 37. I wanted to recall why it had had such a powerful impact on me when I read it as a young man. It didn’t take long to remember.

“Judging by the embarrassment that a frank discussion of one’s feelings about one’s own success, or the lack of it, invariably causes in polite company today,” he wrote in the preface, “ambition . . . seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul.”

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When you think of “White Christmas,” there’s a good chance you can recall every note of Bing Crosby’s crooning delivery, along with the cooing backup vocals of the Ken Darby Singers. After all, you’ve probably heard it hundreds of times: It’s the best-selling single in the history of the world.

For young and middle-aged folks, “White Christmas” is a quintessential secular Christmas song. The lyrics evoke a man staring out his window, pining for snow and a more innocent past while he writes Christmas cards to distant relatives and friends. The sentiment is beautiful and could be felt by anyone, in any time period.

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