To be a critic is to question. That is, a critic asks: Under what conditions was this object made? How does the experience I’m having as a viewer relate to the work of its creation? How does this artwork make me feel? And then there is also the critic’s posture: hunched over their work, their back forms that inquisitive arch, punctuating an aesthetic experience by pondering what has this meant to me? Critic and essayist Megan O’Grady has long inhabited this critical bent. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, she has asked questions such as: Why Are There So Few Monuments That Successfully Depict Women? How Can I Hold On To Hope and Humor While Witnessing So Much Suffering? How Do I Find Meaning and Beauty in My Life? And, introducing a review of Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, that pesky question: Why Write?