Essays
My Mongolian Spot
Jennifer Hope Choi
An ephemeral birthmark is a rare gift, connecting me to generations spanning the centuries
Things Sweet to Taste
Leslie Stainton
Much to my regret, I never truly knew the woman who helped raise me
Goodbye to Westbrook Acres
Andrew Hudgins
As a writer walks and muses, the world’s sorrows intrude upon the peaceful streets he will be leaving
Interstates
Emily Bernard
How My Italian-American husband ate his way into the good graces of my African-American family
The Cloistered Books of Peru
Helen Hazen
A convent in the Andes is home to a treasure trove of rare, and possibly unique, early volumes
Keeping Faith
Mark Lane
After a loss from which there is no recovery, I turned to books—not for solace or forgetting, but simply to survive
The Ultimate Pawn Sacrifice
Jay Neugeboren
My brother’s life mirrored that of Bobby Fischer, the deeply troubled chess master
Chicago Hope
Lincoln Caplan
Can the collaboration between a progressive boarding school and a big-city charter academy transform American Public High School Education?
Writing the Unimaginable
Amitav Ghosh
When future generations look back at the fiction of our time, what will they make of the failure to address the crisis of climate change?
Put a Bird on It
Erik Anderson
How did a beguiling South American hummingbird end up in the basement of a Pennsylvania museum?
Turbulence
Brandon Lingle
Death can come at any time, from above or below, but life requires putting fear aside
Thine as Ever, P. T. Barnum
A. H. Saxon
A scholar offers three utterly fictitious letters he wishes the famous showman had written
Little Bowls of Colors
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
Writing in a foreign language can reveal secrets long buried in our mother tongue
I Will Love You in the Summertime
Christian Wiman
Between the rupture of life and the rapture of language lies a world of awe and witness
My Newfoundland
Paul West
The sensations of landing on the island long ago haunted a writer’s final memories
Hope Is the Enemy
Dasha Kiper
Caring for a patient suffering from dementia means coming to terms with the frustrating paradoxes of memory and language
Capital of Willows
Eben Wood
On a trip to North Korea, a writer remembers his troubled father, a victim of the “Forgotten War”
Matters of Taste
Paul Lukacs
A work of literature and a bottle of wine require similar skills of their respective critics
My Mother’s Yiddish
Phyllis Rose
The music of my childhood was a language filled with endearments and rebukes, and frequent misunderstandings
Saigon Summer
Sarah Mansfield Taber
A spy’s daughter remembers the haunting unreality of embassy life in South Vietnam before the fall
Kill the Creature
Christian Wiman
In search of snakes—and the balm of charity and love in a world of infinitely lonely space
Confessing and Confiding
Emily Fox Gordon
Knowing the difference between the two can elevate an essay from therapy to art
Failure to Heal
Philip Alcabes
Today’s medical industry thrives on diagnosing and curing, but it doesn’t reach the soul
Remains
Donald Hall
As the forest reclaims large stretches of New Hampshire, animals come and go, as do memories of a beloved 19th-century farmhouse
Traveling Corpse
Andrea Barrett
How an American sergeant’s journey through frigid North Russia inspired a work of historical fiction
Leap
Brian Doyle
On Visitors
Ann Beattie
When the Bachelor Girl and the Red Death come calling, are they mirrors for our eccentricities?
At Sixty-Five
Emily Fox Gordon
After the excesses of youth and terrors of middle age, a writer faces the contingencies of being old
One Road
Donald Hall
Driving through postwar Yugoslavia was nearly impossible, but a young poet and his new wife struggled through the desolate landscape to Athens
Kodachrome Eden
James Santel
With purple prose and oversaturated images, National Geographic reimagined postwar America as a dreamspace of hope and fascination
On Friendship
Edward Hoagland
The intimacies shared with our closest companions keep us anchored, vital, and alive
Mortify Our Wolves
Christian Wiman
The struggle back to life and faith in the face of pain and the certainty of death
Joyas Voladoras
Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle, who died on May 27, considers the capacity of the heart—including his own. Rest in peace.
Rites of Passage
Steve Macone
When a quirky old man who lived on the Cape died, I thought I didn’t care
Blue Moons and Buttermilk Skies
William Zinsser
The Complete Zinsser on Friday
William Zinsser
Congratulations to William Zinsser, winner of the 2012 National Magazine Award in the category of Digital Commentary
Affirmative Inaction
William M. Chace
Opposition to affirmative action has drastically reduced minority enrollment at public universities; private institutions have the power and the responsibility to reverse the trend
Dubya and Me
Walt Harrington
Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush
The Psychologist
Brian Boyd
Vladimir Nabokov's understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day
Scar Tissue
Emily Bernard
When I was stabbed 17 years ago in a New Haven coffee shop, the wounds did not only come from the knife
A Mother’s Secret
Werner Gundersheimer
The images in a treasured photo album preserve an idealized past, while leaving out the painful story of a family torn apart by the Holocaust
Making Sparks Fly
Mike Rose
How occupational education can lead to a love of learning for its own sake
In the Orbit of Copernicus
Owen Gingerich
A discovery of the great astronomer's bones, and their reburial in Poland
Plunging to Earth
Robert Zaretsky
Once the sport of daredevils, skydiving now offers it existential thrills to grandmothers, pudgy geeks, and even the occasional college professor
The Forgotten Churchill
George Watson
The man who stared down Hitler also helped create the modern welfare state
Plucked from the Grave
Debra Gwartney
The first female missionary to cross the Continental Divide came to a gruesome end partly caused by her own zeal. What can we learn from her?
Civil Warfare in the Streets
Adam Goodheart
After Fort Sumter, German immigrants in St. Louis flocked to the Union cause and in bloody confrontations overthrew the local secessionists
How Longfellow Woke the Dead
Jill Lepore
When first published 150 years ago, his famous poem about Paul Revere was read as a bold statement of his opposition to slavery
Interview with a Neandertal
Priscilla Long
What I always wanted to ask our distant cousins about love and death and sorrow and dinner
‘I Tried to Stop the Bloody Thing’
Adam Hochschild
In World War I, nearly as many British men refused the draft—20,000—as were killed on the Somme's first day. Why were those who fought for peace forgotten?
The View from 90
Doris Grumbach
Even when those in my generation have reached a state of serenity, wisdom, and relative comfort, what we face can hardly be called the golden years
Baseball’s Loss of Innocence
Diana Goetsch
When the 1919 Black Sox scandal shattered Ring Lardner’s reverence for the game, the great sportswriter took a permanent walk
Unauthorized, But Not Untrue
Kitty Kelley
The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats
Empathy and Other Mysteries
Richard Restak
Neuroscientists are discovering things about the brain that answer questions philosophers have been asking for centuries
To Accept What Cannot Be Helped
Ann Hulbert
At 80, a woman with a fatal disease knows she doesn't want to die in the hospital and discovers, with her family, what that really means
The Seduction
Paula Marantz Cohen
After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students
The Passionate Encounter
Alfred Kazin
A noted midcentury critic has much to say in his journal about his fellow writers and the literary world they shared
Reassessing Rossellini
Joseph Luzzi
Restoration of Rome Open city, the director’s masterpiece, prompts a look at why he later retreated from the neorealism it introduced
Every Last One
Brad Edmondson
A guy with a weakness for demography goes door to door for the census and discovers what a democracy is made of
Blowdown
Tamara Dean
When a tornado tears through a beloved landscape, is it possible to just let nature heal itself?
We’ll Always Have McSorley’s
Robert Day
How Joseph Mitchell's wonderful saloon became a sacred site for a certain literary pilgrim
What the Earth Knows
Robert B. Laughlin
Understanding the concept of geologic time and some basic science can give a new perspective on climate change and the energy future
All Style, No Substance
Amitai Etzioni
What’s wrong with the State Department’s public diplomacy effort
Too Bad Not to Fail
William J. Quirk
Just what are derivatives, and how much more damage can they do?
Voices of a Nation
Brenda Wineapple
In the 19th century, American writers struggled to discover who they were and who we are
Hive of Nerves
Christian Wiman
To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life
The Bearable Lightness of Being
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
If you live long enough and contentedly enough in exile, your feelings of estrangement can evolve into a sense of living two lives at once
Solitude and Leadership
William Deresiewicz
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
Reading in a Digital Age
Sven Birkerts
Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary
Nabokov Lives On
Brian Boyd
Why his unfinished novel, Laura, deserved to be published; what’s left in the voluminous archive of his unpublished work
To Die of Having Lived
Richard Rapport
A neurological surgeon reflects on what patients and their families should and should not do when the end draws near
My Brain on My Mind
Priscilla Long
The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember
The Stolen Election
Gelareh Asayesh
An expatriate Iranian writer travels her troubled homeland in the weeks after a disputed presidential vote
Seventy Years Later
John Lukacs
The Second World War destroyed Adolf Hitler, but his legacy is showing disturbing signs of life
Wrestling with Two Behemoths
Ved Mehta
A longtime New Yorker, and New Yorker writer, gets the cold shoulder from powerful New York cultural institutions
The Doctor Is IN
Daniel B. Smith
At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside
Armchair Travelers
Toby Lester
The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity
Mother Country
Evelyn Toynton
A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune
Saratoga Bill
Zachary Sklar
He bet cautiously at the track, but elsewhere he was drawn to those with the odds stacked against them
The Terminator Comes to Wall Street
Joseph Fuller
How computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it
Purpose-Driven Life
Brian Boyd
Evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity.
Second Chances, Social Forgiveness, and the Internet
Amitai Etzioni
We need the means, both technological and legal, to replace measures once woven into the fabric of communities
The Potency of Breathless
Paula Marantz Cohen
At 50, Godard’s film still asks how something this bad can be so good
The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln
Ernest B. Furgurson
The hatter Boston Corbett was celebrated as a hero for killing John Wilkes Booth. Fame and fortune did not follow, but madness did.
Visions and Revisions
William Zinsser
Writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years
Dawn of a Literary Friendship
John McIntyre
In 1969 the writer Robert Phelps first wrote to the novelist James Salter. Here are the letters that forged a bond of two decades.
I Wanted to Be Robert Phelps
Michael Dirda
The Dowser Dilemma
Kate Daloz
How a town in Vermont found water it desperately needed and an explanation that was harder to swallow
Putting Man Before Descartes
John Lukacs
Human knowledge is personal and participant—placing us at the center of the universe
The Future of the American Frontier
John Tirman
Can one of our most enduring national myths, much in evidence in the recent presidential campaign, be reinvented yet again?
Affirmative Action and After
W. Ralph Eubanks
Now is the time to reconsider a policy that must eventually change. But simply replacing race with class isn’t the solution.
Spies Among Us
Clay Risen
Military snooping on civilians, which escalated in the turbulent '60s, never entirely went away and is back again on a much larger scale
A Country for Old Men
Edward Hoagland
Having reached the shores of seniority himself, the author finds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees
Collateral Damage
Robert Roper
The Civil War only enhanced George Whitman's soldierly satisfaction; for his brother Walt, however, the horrors halted an outpouring of great poetry
My Bright Abyss
Christian Wiman
I never felt the pain of unbelief until I believed. But belief itself is hardly painless.
The High Road to Narnia
George Watson
C. S. Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien believed that truths are universal and that stories reveal them
The Censor in the Mirror
Ha Jin
It’s not only what the Chinese Propaganda Department does to artists, but what it makes artists do to their own work
The Torture Colony
Bruce Falconer
In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds
Where Does American History Begin?
Ted Widmer
Mixing geography with invention, the first explorers and mapmakers made the New World a very hard place to pin down
Something Called Terrorism
Leonard Bernstein
In a speech given at Harvard 22 years ago and never before published, Leonard Bernstein offered a warning that remains timely
The New Old Way of Learning Languages
Ernest Blum
Now all but vanished, a once-popular system of reading Greek and Latin classics could revitalize modern teaching methods
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
William Deresiewicz
Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers
The End of the Black American Narrative
Charles Johnson
A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences
Intimacy
André Aciman
Revisiting the gritty Roman neighborhood of his youth, a writer discovers a world of his own invention
The Bout
Blair Fuller
When George Plimpton, the boyish editor of The Paris Review, went three rounds with the light-heavyweight champion of the world
The Broken Balance
Edward Hoagland
The poet Robinson Jeffers warned us nearly a century ago of the ravages to nature we now face
Passing the Torch
Stephen J. Pyne
Why the eons-old truce between humans and fire has burst into an age of megafires, and what can be done about it
The Liberal Imagination of Frederick Douglass
Nick Bromell
Honoring the emotions that give life to liberal principles
What Kind of Father Am I?
James McConkey
Looking back at a lifetime of parenting sons and being parented by them
Rome’s Gossip Columnist
Garry Wills
When the first-century poet Martial turned his stylus on you, you got the point
Shipwrecked
Janna Malamud Smith
Like Robinson Crusoe after the storm, a daughter salvages what she can after her mother’s death
A Slow Devouring
Steve Macone
Banter, beer, and bar food smooth a disciplined but difficult passage through Finnegans Wake
Who Cares About Executive Supremacy?
Lincoln Caplan
The scope of presidential power is the most urgent and the most ignored legal and political issue of our time
Moral Principle vs. Military Necessity
David Bosco
The first code of conduct during warfare, created by a Civil War–era Prussian immigrant, reflected ambiguities we struggle with to this day
Dreaming of a Democratic Russia
Sarah E. Mendelson
Memories of a year in Moscow promoting a post-Soviet political process, an undertaking that now seems futile
Cuss Time
Jill McCorkle
By limiting freedom of expression, we take away thoughts and ideas before they have the opportunity to hatch
Balanchine’s Cabinet
Ann Hagman Cardinal
A young woman wins a drawing and learns to give and to receive
Confluences
Jennifer Sinor
As a beloved uncle makes his final journey in the wilderness, a new life begins
Findings: Meditations on the Literature of Spying
Jacques Barzun
From the Spring 1965 issue of The Scholar
Findings: For Jacques Barzun on his 100th Birthday
Robert Wilson
Wonder Bread
Melvin Jules Bukiet
Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft
Unto Caesar
Ethan Fishman
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
The Trojan War
William Nichols
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
Poetry Stand
Diana Goetsch
How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand
Apologies All Around
Gorman Beauchamp
Today's tendency to make amends for the crimes of history raises the question: where do we stop?
Findings: Richard E. Nicholls on Amateurism
Richard E. Nicholls
The Mystery of Ales
Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya
The argument that Alger Hiss was a WWII-era Soviet asset is flawed. New evidence points to someone else
The Mystery of Ales (Expanded Version)
Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya
The argument that Alger Hiss was a WWII-era Soviet asset is flawed. New evidence points to someone else
Love on Campus
William Deresiewicz
Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor
Gazing Into the Abyss
Christian Wiman
The sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a “hope toward God”
‘Mem, Mem, Mem’
Paul West
After a stroke, a prolific novelist struggles to say how the mental world of aphasia looks and feels
Between Two Worlds
Christopher Clausen
The familar story of Pocahontas was mirrored by that of a young Englishman given as a hostage to her father
A New Theory of the Universe
Robert Lanza
Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation
When 2+2=5
Robert Orsi
Can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?
The Judge's Jokes
John Barth
Shards of memory, for better or for worse, from my father the after-banquet speaker
The Apologist
Michael McDonald
The celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke appeared at the funeral of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him?
The Cook's Son
Frank Huyler
The death of a young man, long ago in Africa, continues to raise questions with no answers
One Day in the Life of Melvin Jules Bukiet
Melvin Jules Bukiet
A Manhattan writer runs afoul of the local penal system and lives to tell the tale
The Dispossessed
William Deresiewicz
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
Ted Widmer
Who knew that mixing the intelligent and the idiosyncratic would yield a long life for a certain small quarterly?
Not Compassionate, Not Conservative
Ethan Fishman
A political traditionalist critiques our pseudo-conservative president
Fear of Falling
James McConkey
Working in the mop-and-bucket brigade in college created the perspectives of a lifetime
Glorious Dust
Robert Roper
The posthumous masterwork of an influential black historian tells how slavery itself undermined the Confederacy
Getting It All Wrong
Brian Boyd
The proponents of Theory and Cultural Critique could learn a thing or two from bioculture
Lincoln the Persuader
Douglas L. Wilson
Seeking to get people behind his policies, he made himself the best writer for all our presidents
My Mother’s Body
Mary Gordon
Just remembering her is not enough; resurrecting her is the ultimate goal
Tomorrow Is Another Day
Carol Huang
An Ethiopian student survives a brutal imprisonment by translating Gone with the Wind into his native tongue
Bearing Gifts
Anne Matthews
The Ordinariness of AIDS
Philip Alcabes
Can a disease that tells us so much about ourselves ever be anything but extraordinary?
The Sack of Baghdad
Susannah Rutherglen
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned cultural icons into loot and archaeological sites into ruins
Miles from Nowhere
Edward Hoagland
On a return trip to the wilderness of British Columbia, the author revisits a rough and exquisite landscape
The Embarrassment of Riches
Pamela Haag
Do not pity me for having more money than anyone I know. Still, wealth does have its mild difficulties
The Case for Love
Natalie Wexler
Did the friendship of an early Supreme Court justice and the wife of a colleague ever cross the line of propriety?
Findings: A Bogey Tale
Brian Doyle
What Jesus Did
Garry Wills
Forget about Christ as secular sage, historical figure, or even as Christian
Shouldn’t There Be a Word ... ?
Barbara Wallraff
The holes in our language and the never-ending search for words to fill them
The Idea of Bombay
Gyan Prakash
Bollywood epitomized modernity for a boy in a distant province. As an adult, he sees a troubled city.
Henry James vs. the Robber Barons
Gorman Beauchamp
Why Italian art should stay in England, where it belongs, and not fall into the hands of foreigners
My Holocaust Problem
Arthur Krystal
If we cannot speak of it—though speak of it we must—how do we remember what happened to the Jews of Europe?
Palladio in the Rough
Witold Rybczynski
A South Carolinian builds classical revival houses that really look old
Fadeaway Jumper
Mark Edmundson
A Sunday-afternoon player of a certain age says his farewell to basketball
Buster Brown's America
Jiri Wyatt
How a Jew from Slovakia became a Catholic from Manhattan, then fell from grace and turned into a real American
A Visit to Esperantoland
Arika Okrent
The natives want you to learn their invented language as a step toward world harmony. Who are these people?
Teaching the N-Word
Emily Bernard
A black professor, an all-white class, and the thing nobody will say
The Rise and Fall of David Duke
Lawrence N. Powell
Breaking the code of right-wing populism in Louisana
Custom and Law
Melvin Jules Bukiet
After the death of his father, a not-notably observant Jew turns to the mourning rituals of his faith
Findings: The Battered Trunk
Brenda Wineapple
The Glue Is Gone
Edward Hoagland
The things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again?
So Help Me God
Ted Widmer
What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history
What We Got Wrong
Lawrence Rosen
How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions
The Crooner and the Physicist
Jeremy Bernstein
Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass
Findings: Another Washington Leak
Patricia O’Toole
Reaching Point Comfort
Adam Goodheart
Sweet Mayhem
Spencer Nadler
Fat
Spencer Nadler
E-newsletter
THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK
Joyas Voladoras
By By Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle, who died on May 27, once wrote that “the biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale.” After reading years of his writing, including almost 200 of his “Epiphanies,” we’re not so sure. Rest in peace, Brian. Your heart held so much in this lifetime.
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Online Essays
Works you won’t find in print, from the likes of Harold Holzer, Wendy Smith, and Neil Shea
Red: The History of a Color
By Michel Pastoureau
This week, read an excerpt from a new book about the shade of love and rage
