What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stranger in the Village’

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Updated 08 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stranger in the Village’

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  • Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery

Author: James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” from his seminal collection “Notes of a Native Son,” is a searing exploration of race, identity, and the weight of history.

Baldwin juxtaposes his experience as the first Black man in a remote Swiss village — where villagers gawk, children shout racial epithets, and his presence sparks both fascination and fear — with the entrenched racism of America.

Through this contrast, he dissects the paradox of being perceived as an exotic “stranger” in Europe while remaining an oppressed outsider in his homeland.

Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery.

In Switzerland, the villagers’ “innocent” othering lacks the violent history of American racism, yet Baldwin reveals how both contexts dehumanize Blackness.

He argues that white America, built on the subjugation of Black people, cannot escape its past — a past that distorts both the oppressor’s and the oppressed’s sense of self.

“People are trapped in history,” he writes, “and history is trapped in them.”

The essay’s power lies in Baldwin’s ability to weave personal reflection with incisive social critique. His encounters in the village mirror the broader African American experience: the exhaustion of being perpetually “seen but not seen,” and the rage born of systemic erasure.

Yet Baldwin resists despair, asserting that acknowledgment of this shared history is the first step toward liberation, even as he questions whether true equality is achievable.

Stylistically, Baldwin’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, blending vivid imagery with philosophical depth.

The essay’s enduring relevance lies in its piercing examination of otherness and its challenge to confront uncomfortable truths.

Published over seven decades ago, Baldwin’s call to reckon with history’s ghosts remains urgent, a testament to his unparalleled vision and moral clarity.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and  Craft of Doing Science’
Updated 05 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and  Craft of Doing Science’

Author: Kenneth Catania 

Like any creative endeavor, science can be a messy and chaotic affair.

“On the Art and Craft of Doing Science” shares the creative process of an innovative and accomplished scientist, taking readers behind the scenes of some of his most pioneering investigations and explaining why the practice of science, far from being an orderly exercise in pure logic, is a form of creative expression like any other art.

Kenneth Catania begins by discussing how ideas set the stage for scientific breakthroughs and goes on to describe ways to approach experimental design.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

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  • It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes

Author: ANDREW W. BERNSTEIN

Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan.

Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear.

It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes.

And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

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  • Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history

Aleksandar Hemon’s 2011 essay “The Aquarium” is an exploration of parental love, grief, and the isolating toll of confronting a child’s mortality. The essay was first published in The New Yorker and later appeared in “The Book of My Lives” in 2013.

Written with unflinching honesty, the piece chronicles Hemon’s experience navigating his infant daughter Isabel’s diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and the family’s agonizing journey through surgeries, chemotherapy, and loss.  

Hemon juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical jargon — “external ventricular drain,” “stem-cell recovery” — with visceral snapshots: Isabel’s breath on his chest, her laughter amid IV drips, her small hand gripping his finger.

At the heart of the essay lies the metaphor of an aquarium where the family exists in a suffocating bubble, visible to the outside world but severed from its rhythms.

Central to the narrative is Hemon’s elder daughter Ella, who processes her sister’s illness through an imaginary brother, Mingus.

Stylistically, Hemon oscillates between reporter-like precision and raw vulnerability. He rejects platitudes about suffering’s “ennobling” nature, writing: “Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.”

The essay’s power lies in its refusal to soften despair, instead confronting the “indelible absence” grief leaves behind.

Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, he doesn’t just tell stories; he uses language to find pockets of hope in shattered lives.

Think of him as a guide through the chaos of modern exile — equal parts poet and provocateur.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

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Updated 03 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

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  • In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy

Author: Ian Duncan

The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.

In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses, even as the two were separating into distinct domains.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

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Updated 02 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

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  • The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability

Author: Gregory Claeys

In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. 

“Utopianism for a Dying Planet” examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today’s thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe.

The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.
Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives.