The Ultimate Cost of Our Endless Wars

Could the debt alone deal a fatal blow to our democracy?

The Trope of a Nation

The First President To Be Impeached

Andrew Johnson beat the charges against him by a single vote, but what did the nation lose?

Southern Cassandra

Lillian Smith was a writer and a radical who called out her region’s lies about sex and race

Shrinking Success

Psychopharmacology has not lived up to its early promise

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington

Continental Drift

Westward expansion delayed a needed national reckoning

The End of The Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969)

Jacques Barzun delivered this lecture half a century ago

How the South Rose Again

Defeated in war, the Confederate states merely changed tactics

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Fantastical Little Dyer

Few artists could match Tintoretto’s mastery of color and form—or his sense of playfulness

At Play in the Fields of the Bored

America’s newest city parks are chock-full of things to do—but what happened to the delights of idle time in a natural setting?

The Root Cause

Padraic X. Scanlan tells the real history of the Irish Potato Famine

In the Mushroom

True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

Consolidated Ruin

“After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” by Emily Dickinson

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño

Ancestral healing

Asteroid Hunters

The scientists and engineers who defend our planet day and night from potentially hazardous space rocks

Who Would I Be Off My Meds

Can weaning oneself off pharmaceuticals ease the cycle of perpetual suffering?

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistanceby Laura Delano

Brown Wasps

“Writing in the Dark” by Denise Levertov

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Tiger Mom

At a forest preserve in India, a writer sees the world anew and learns how to focus her son’s restless mind

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