Departures

Net Gains

Nabokov’s profitable summer chasing butterflies and settling scores in the Utah mountains

N Judah

Big Shoulders

How curiosity and cognition have driven our species forward

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos By Leonard Mlodinow

Three Données
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Saigon Summer

A spy’s daughter remembers the haunting unreality of embassy life in South Vietnam before the fall

The Paper Chase

Years of tireless collecting led to one of the world’s great libraries

The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio By Andrea Mays

Strong but Quiet

The achievement of Andrea del Sarto

Fantastic Four

The enduring influence of a quartet of Oxford dons

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings By Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

Double Exposure

On our first memories

Verde

Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew

Magic Men

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Under a Spell Everlasting

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, published a century ago, tells of a world unable to free itself from the cataclysm of war

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

The Fair Fields
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Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

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