Essays

The window of a Humvee rolling through Baghdad’s dangerous streets is essentially a television, watched in the dark. The glass is dirty and three inches thick: everything has a hazy and muted look, like a rerun of an old seventies movie...

This past Saturday afternoon, photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson appeared in Charlottesville as part of the Festival of the Photograph, giving a talk co-sponsored by VQR and The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Gilbertson read his essay...

I have been born on this earth for nothing else except to bear witness,
tied down by my weight, my heaviness, and my lightness.

Jiří Orten is one of the key Czech poets of the twentieth century. He belongs with his brilliant predecessors...

Self-portrait by Kurt Vonnegut.

If you had to be out and about as a hurricane was bearing down on New York City, there were worse places to be than in the back of a limousine with Kurt Vonnegut. Especially if you were twenty-three years old...

He is taking me on a tour of Juárez, but we won’t be visiting any museums or historic sights. We are going to tour the City of Death—Juárez’s slums, or colonias.

Eduardo saw Jesus coming with His holy light. It was winter, and for days, lost in a strange land, Eduardo had been wandering through mountains with nothing to eat and nothing to drink except what he could scoop from puddles of melted snow.

The image of a nineteenth-century military man, Sherman, bearded and with a haunted stare, evokes patriotism’s fearful complexities.

There comes a point in many a person’s life when things that Nietzsche said begin to make good sense. This is not necessarily a propitious sign. Understanding or simply identifying with Nietzsche doesn’t typically fill one’s life with joy...