Defeat

Findings: Privacy Revealed

From the Archives

Happy Talk

What did we know about joy, and when did we know it?

The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is WrongBy Jennifer Michael Hecht / Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy By Barbara Ehrenreich

The Impulse to Exclude

Ralph Ellison wrote one great novel and then lived a life that is hard to admire

Hearsay

From the divinely inspired to the pathological, a history of auditory hallucination

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination By Daniel B. Smith

An Epic in Flux

Gilgamesh, the world’s first great literary work, is still being pieced together

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh By David Damrosch

Design Problem

Does the internal physiology of animals imply a harmony of structure and function?

The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself By J. Scott Turner

War Weary

If Iraq is not another Vietnam, why do I find myself rereading Dispatches?

The Dispossessed

First we stopped noticing members of the working class, and now we’re convinced they don’t exist

THE SCHOLAR AT 75: An Educated Guess

Who knew that mixing the intelligent and the idiosyncratic would yield a long life for a certain small quarterly?

Muscle Memory

Michael Joseph Gross on the importance of strength, past and present

Doing Nothing Is Everything

An areligious writer finds peace in a Benedictine monastery

Aflame: Learning from Silenceby Pico Iyer

Facts of the Case

“Campo dei Fiori” by Czesław Miłosz

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Helina Metaferia

An army of activists

Lessons From Harlem

A white blues player’s streetside education

Splitting Our Sides

A new biography of a comedy pioneer

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Liveby Susan Morrison

Terra do Queixo

“The Dream” by Theodore Roethke

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Song for the Earth

Finding a message for today in the music of Gustav Mahler

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