Hai is 19 and suicidal. Grazina is 81 and living alone with dementia. So when she strikes a deal to house him so they can keep each other company in exchange for his help as a kind of unofficial ...

There is much talk in Paris, in Greenwich Village, even in the center of Manhattan, about existence and existentialism. The existentialists assemble in the Cafe de Flore in Paris. There is a series of ...

Nihilism and existentialism are certainly not the same, and the Classic Crime’s “The Happy Nihilist” illustrates the difference impeccably with its description of a lost soul who “used to read ...

Pessimism is back. That will not surprise anyone who has been keeping track of the nation’s pulse over the past several months — or perhaps the last several years. Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, ...

Existentialism, which was all the rage in Europe and America in the late ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, has lost much discernible meaning. One rarely even hears the term these days. In our age of terror, ...

The literary lion of Paris bounced into Manhattan last week for a brief lecture tour (stops at Yale, Harvard, Princeton). He put up at a genteel midtown hotel—partly because he could find no other ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue ...

Jean-Paul Sartre, a very short, very cheerful Parisian, lectured at the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall last week without provoking a riot or a single refined cry of “Salaud! ” or “Fumiste!,” the latter, ...