I’ve taken up something new this summer: swimming lessons. After years of feeling only marginally comfortable in the water, I've decided to try to learn to swim properly – for exercise and, should it ever come to that, for survival. As I work on my breathing and strokes, I’ve also been thinking about why we swim in the first place. On the wall of the JCC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I take my classes, there’s a quotation from the Talmud that lists things that par

I’ve been writing recently about books inspired by the moon. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, it’s the scorching sun that drives the senseless murder at the center of the plot. This existential novella completes my trio of posts on the theme of regret, and it’s a big departure from the first two. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway recounts the death-bed regrets of a writer who abandoned his literary talent, while in “Feathers,” Raymond Carver explores a more naggi

I’m a latecomer to The White Lotus, but I’ve now devoured the first two seasons. It’s cleverly plotted, smartly written and the locales (Hawaii in Season 1, and Sicily in Season 2) are gorgeous. This TV series has also sent me back, unexpectedly, to thinking about Ernest Hemingway. Each season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy guests at a luxury resort who both lose and reveal themselves while on vacation. By the end of the trip, someone also ends up dead. I'm war

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece. The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a lot