Scar Tissue

When I was stabbed 17 years ago in a New Haven coffee shop, the wounds did not only come from the knife

Three Poems

Frost

Paradise

A fledgling romance in the Washington mountains, and another, doomed love affair that cannot be forgotten

A Mother’s Secret

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

Responses to our Summer 2011 Issue

Idleness

Beginners

To make it in the music business requires more than a bit of luck: it might mean choosing between family and oneself

Monster Theory

Practice

From Eternity to Here

Dante in Love By A. N. Wilson

Getting Better All the Time

Although you wouldn’t know it by watching the local news, humankind is becoming ever more civilized

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined By Steven Pinker

Dubya and Me

Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush

A Chesterton With No Flab

A new anthology often obscures the writer’s best work

The Everyman Chesterton By G. K. Chesterton

LBJ’s Wild Ride

Hanging on for dear life during the 1960 campaign

Secret Sharers

In an age of leaks, forgeries, and Internet hoaxes, archivists must guard our information while keeping hackers at bay

Leningraders, summer 1942

The Worst of Times

A Soviet city barely survives

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944 By Anna Reid

John Brown’s Folly

The mythology of a madman

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War By Tony Horwitz

The Psychologist

Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day

John Koethe’s Red Shoes

Power Crazy

Do lunatics make better leaders?

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness By Nassir Ghaemi

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