Wonder Bread

Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft

The Genius and Her Sanctuary

Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm

Atonality and Beyond

The century when composers and audiences parted company

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Early End of Consensus

Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign By Edward J. Larson

Unto Caesar

Religious groups that have allied themselves with politicians, and vice versa, have ignored at their peril the lessons of Roger Williams and U.S. history

Swept Away

When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject’s horrors

The Wreck of the Medusa By Jonathan Miles

Nurtural Intelligence

The discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you’d expect

What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect By James R. Flynn

Words and Music

Two ways of thinking about what our brains can do

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human NatureBy Steven Pinker / Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks

Response to Our Summer Issue

The Trojan War

Now even some environmentalists are supporting the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. One man’s story suggests the industry can’t be trusted

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

A Story for Christmas

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