First, in the Saturday Essay, Ben Wirth looks back on New Year’s Eve 1999 with mixed feelings. Hope, apprehension, wonder, and naiveté color his memory—along with cultural landmarks like Fight Club, MTV, and Conan O’Brien.
And Patrick James Dunagan observes the benevolent merging of the “creative” and the “scientific” in his review of a retrospective anthology of the interdisciplinary journal Io. Since Io launched in the mid-60s, it has inspired a small press called North Atlantic Books and served as one of the more “precisely relevant” and “remarkably unique” literary journals of its time.
Meanwhile, Brandon Hicks illustrates three nostalgic stories of summertime in “The Wharf.”
Finally, Marin Sardy contemplates the death of her brother, Tom, in the Sunday Essay. Sardy struggles with the enormity of the loss, with the “baffling absolute” of his absence. Sardy looks up into the vast night sky for answers and finds some meaning in the ancient deity of the night, Nyx.
