Thought Experimenters

Making sense of a broken world

The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger

The Late Bloomer

Reconstructing a private poet’s life

Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman

Naturalists Unknown

Lives marked by discovery and erasure

Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science by Catherine McNeur

Alphabet of Despair

The photographic language of Dorothea Lange conveyed order and beauty in a dusty, impoverished America

Down and Out

A woman excised from her eminent husband’s story

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

A Burning World

Can poetry truly supply the language to express the ineffable sensations of suffering and love?

It’s All Greek to Her

The woman who brought mythology to the masses

American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman

The Days After

Remembering Samantha Smith, the girl who dared to dream of peace at a time when so many feared a global war

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit

“There was the rabbit lying in the middle of the road, legs limp but twitching before its head sagged and went still.”

A Clean, Well-Ordered Place

An ode to the grocery store

Connect or Die

The high cost of going it alone

This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativityby Richard Deming

Lionized

The life and death of a celebrity puma—and what it really means to be wild  

Origin Stories

What we know of  Flannery O’Connor’s childhood—and how her views on race took shape—is incomplete if her caretaker Emma Jackson remains in obscurity

To Get to the Other Side

Roads and the future of life on Earth

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb

Patience, Practice, Perseverance

How Octavia E. Butler became a writer

A Turn to the Dark Side

Reckoning with 9/11, the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic has compelled
historians to rethink the Civil War and its aftermath

This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse

Is a new form of methamphetamine really to blame for a host of urban problems?

Shostakovich in South Dakota

A manifesto for the future of American classical music

Queen of the Castle

Looking for Mama Lou, the legendary singer whose work helped inspire American ragtime

The Grinberg Affair

One of Mexico’s most curious missing-persons cases involves a scientist who dabbled in the mystical arts

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