A small selection of notable posts from the past twelve months of the NYRblog, from A to Z.

AIDS

It is difficult now to call up the particular mood that prevailed in the AIDS epidemic’s early years. I am not talking about the first rumblings, when no one knew enough to be afraid, but further in.

Bill Hayes, AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

Also: Abbottabad, Alexandria

Boredom

Looking back now, I realize how much I owe to my boredom. Drowning in it, I came face to face with myself as if in a mirror.

Charles Simic, A Reunion with Boredom

Also: Bookstores

Chekhov

Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers.”

Peter Sekirin, Memories of Chekhov

Also: Caves, Comedy

Damascus

Over the last couple of weeks, with the Arab League’s decision to further isolate Syria with sweeping economic sanctions, the mood in Damascus has rapidly blackened.

Anonymous, Twilight in Damascus

Also: Dalai Lama, Death Row, Dictators , Drones

English Translation

Is there a skeleton lingua franca beneath the new global novel?

Tim Parks, Your English Is Showing

Also: Education, Egypt

Fonts

I was always interested in typefaces, but I became obsessed with them only when my wife got pregnant.

Edward Mendelson, The Human Face of Type

Also: Fashion, Fox News

GOP

There is always something if not a lot to learn by watching a circus—one is both amazed by and sorry for the animals.

Lorrie Moore, Circus Elephants

Also: Google

Houses, Writers’

That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

April Bernard, Here’s What I Hate About Writers’ Houses

Also: Hitler

Israel

To read these reports from the territories is to see the profound moral corruption of the occupation in all its starkness.

David Shulman, ‘And No One Wants to Know’: Israeli Soldiers on the Occupation

Also: Iran

Jonah

Nobody comes out looking very impressive from the book of Jonah, whether God, Jonah, the ship captain and his men, or the king of Nineveh and his people.

Harold Bloom, My Favorite Book in the Bible

Kalman, Maira

Perhaps Kalman’s greatest gift is that her work embodies both the ironic and the earnest at their best, at the place where they come together and create lyrical, personal truth.

Cathleen Schine, The Irresistible Charms of Maira Kalman

Also: Kitchens

Libya

Any effort to argue for intervention in circumstances where the protection of lives and rights are involved almost immediately gets framed as values versus interests, no matter how hard the advocate of intervention insists that it is interests versus interests.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Interests vs. Values? Misunderstanding Obama’s Libya Strategy

Also: Libraries, Lod Mosaic

Migrants

A great deal of our menial labor today is performed by undocumented migrant workers—many of whom risk their lives in thousand-mile journeys simply to get to the United States.

72migrantes.com, Sacrificing Their Lives to Work

Also: Mubarak, Murdoch

Nim Chimpsky

A new documentary raises important issues about the distinction between humans and animals, about our attitudes toward animals, and about scientific objectivity (or the lack thereof) in behavioral research.

Peter Singer, The Troubled Life of Nim Chimpsky

Also: Norway, Nobel Prize

Ohio

The notion that the federal government ought to be starved of resources is not patriotism: it is right-wing anarchism, which corrodes not only the American state but the American nation.

Timothy Snyder, As Ohio Goes: A Letter from Tea-Party Country

Also: Obama

Phantom Tollbooth, The

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose.

Michael Chabon, ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ and the Wonder of Words

Also: Pakistan, Postcards, Protest

Qatar

Visiting Qatar, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the country is intensely interested in writing a past for itself.

Hugh Eakin, Defining a Culture in Doha’s Desert

Revolution

The question has come to haunt every article and broadcast from Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the region whose people have revolted: what constitutes a revolution?

Robert Darnton, 1789—2011?

Also: Rembrandt, Rome, Roosevelt

Smith, Patti

There was reason to expect some personal revelations when the musician and writer Patti Smith took the stage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Friday evening in early December. She was there to talk about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

Christopher Benfey, How to Be the Photograph

Texas

The GOP has become the party of stale air; and now who should come bounding in but another slicked up trashmouth, Governor Perry, a man whose only salient principle seems to be that all attention is good.

Larry McMurtry, The Rick Perry Hustle

Also: Tibet, Twain

Underground

As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me.

Bruce Davidson, Train of Thought: On the ‘Subway’ Photographs

Also: Uganda, Ukraine

Venice

if Venice is still the premier international contemporary-art bonanza, it may have become a victim of its own success.

Eric Banks, The Venice Biennale: The Good, the Bad, and the American

Also: Vilnius

Wallace, David Foster

“Because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago. Therefore we are under more of a moral obligation to try very very very hard to develop compassion and mercy and empathy.”

Ostap Karmodi, ‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview with David Foster Wallace

Also: Warhol, Woodman, Winter

Xile

Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?

Roberto Bolaño, Exiles

Yiwu, Liao

“I never said I wanted to go into exile or flee. It’s just because if I didn’t my books wouldn’t get published. I guess I won’t go back for a while.”

Ian Johnson, An Interview with Liao Yiwu

Zucotti Park

The protesters are eager to hear from many people on the issues and policy options facing the nation. I feel lucky to be witnessing this. It is one of the exciting social experiments of our time.

Jeff Madrick, A Zuccotti Park Education