A Weathered Plaque, a Vanished World, and the Return of Mrs. Meadows A few weeks ago, I met with the head of the ProHuman Foundation and its director of communications. They showed me a graphic for a new campaign. Their goal is to restore the faded plaque at the Lincoln Memorial marking the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream”
Working briefly at Shakespeare and Company in 1972 introduced me to the amazing world of 1920s Paris. I learned about Sylvia Beach opening the original store in 1919, the convergence of many of the great authors of the period, including Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others, at the store, and the complex, competitive yet fertile relationships among them. I was 18 and fantasized about what it
January 25–29, 2026 I have come back to Paris again, this time walking with sticks, slower than I once walked and attentive in a way speed never allowed. The only people I pass are the very old, most of whom walk lopsided with canes. Paris has been part of my life since my twenties. It has seen me married, broken, open, reassembled, tested, loved, and
By Daniel Chertoff and Michael Tobin When we tell people we co-authored a novel, the first question is usually, “What is it about?” The second, almost inevitably, is more interesting: “How do two people write a book together?” It’s a fair question, and it carries a quiet assumption—that writing is, by nature, solitary. The image persists: a lone figure at a desk, wrestling with sentences
Reading Siddhartha Across Fifty Years There are moments in a life when something becomes clear in a way that leaves no room for avoidance. Nothing external has changed. No new information has been introduced. Yet something inside shifts, and what was once easy to overlook suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. What matters is not the moment itself but what follows—whether we turn toward what we
In the summer of 1962, at Camp Greenhaven in western Massachusetts, I learned something about myself I had never suspected. Not gradually, not through reflection, but all at once, in a moment that I resisted with everything I had. I was a waiter at the camp, which meant carrying overloaded trays through a dining hall filled with impatient, grabbing, shouting campers. But that wasn’t why
Epigraph: “How do you know that a book is great? They tell you.” I didn’t always love reading. In a family that did, I was the exception. It wasn’t until junior high school that I gradually came to appreciate literature. A classmate I admired was a reader and used to recommend books to our circle of friends. We would read and discuss the books he
In his generous blurb for my book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel (Toby, 2019), Yossi Klein Halevi wrote that for Jews, “history is always personal.” It is the summation of countless personal memories constructed from individual stories passed down through generations. Objectively, history is “his story” – an account of events that occurred to someone else. But for Jews, it
There’s a place I visit without going anywhere. It usually begins when I’m reading. I’m holding a book, and something in it—a word, a sentence, or an image—shifts my mind sideways. Suddenly, I’m no longer in my house. I’m in a library next to a pond. A white building sat atop a small hill. The simple columns made it seem as if it had been
I know now what instinct compelled me to search for a photograph from forty-six years ago. I was alone in Paris two months ago, a city where memory lingers—memory her mind no longer holds. I write the stories with her, about her, and now, increasingly, without her. The photograph was taken in a small apartment at 65 Boulevard de Sébastopol. The high ceilings are accented