What if Native Americans had discovered Europe, if Nazi Germany emerged victorious in World War II, if Trump wins the 2023 election? What if your parents had never met one another?   Sean Sheehan   Speculating along these lines invite responses ranging from intellectual curiosity to fear, trepidation and an […]

Hegel remarked about the Peloponnesian War that its importance is that it allowed Thucydides to write about it and the same could be said about another armed conflict from the ancient Greek world: the struggle between an alliance of Greek states and the city of Troy, in what is now […]

Jorie Graham’s “To 2040”, which provides the title for her latest collection of poetry, is a terrifying vision of what comes after the ecological meltdown that the present economic order is hurtling us towards.   Sean Sheehan   The human sense of time’s passage is endangered, minutes become indistinguishable from […]

Epics and mythical stories were good at visualizing beasts that only a hero or a god could defeat. Such creatures tend not to appear in modern-day novels but dementia could be described as a monster that hasn’t gone away, one that is continuing to grow more fearsome.   Sean Sheehan […]