Essays by

Ursula Lindsey

Edward Said’s Double Vision

Years ago, I read a famous essay by Edward Said about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. I grew up reading Austen, and adoring her, so the […]

Guest House for Young Widows

Moaveni questions the very idea of “radicalization,” putting the term in scare quotes and describing it skeptically as “some fuzzy ideological process” and “a notion that reliably elicited Western donor funding to local civil society organizations.” But what these women did strikes me as very radical indeed.

Slowing Up Time

The belief that the past is never actually lost undergirds the writer’s politics as well as his art. To insist that the dead are still with us, as Bassani does, is both an indictment and a consolation.

Lessons of Defeat

In the early 1970s, the leftist student movement in Egypt organized protests that rocked the country. Arwa Salih was a leading member of the movement, […]

Innocence Abroad

It’s remarkable, given the propensity of American officials, journalists and academics to refer to other nations and cultures as immature and underdeveloped, how frequently and consistently Americans themselves are described as children, by both foreign authors and American writers themselves.

Lesser Evils

When I was in Marseille in early March, people often told me two seemingly contradictory things about their city: that it is unique, different from everywhere else in France, and that it is the true face of France, the one place where the entire country can be understood.