Strange Matter

The physics and poetics of the search for the God particle

Wrestling with Two Behemoths

A longtime New Yorker, and New Yorker writer, gets the cold shoulder from powerful New York cultural institutions

Writing About Writers

Covering the book beat

The Doctor Is IN

At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside

Notes from the Earth

Running Yangtze rapids, following Afghan herdsmen, four-wheeling Australia’s Jack Hills—intimate contacts with natural landscapes

A Mindful Beauty

What poetry and applied mathematics have in common

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

Mother Country

A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune

Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore

Reconciling the myth of Ronald Reagan with the reality

Shock Waves

A blast in Baghdad tests the endurance of a soldier and his family

Rage, Muse

The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or forgotten

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament
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After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

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