Letter From Mumbai: Intolerance

An open letter to India’s Prime Minister from a persecuted writer

Four Poems

Adventures of the Double-Headed Girl, The Girl with Antlers, Thou Shalt Not, Monogamy

Sound and Fury

The flawed, tragic hero whose music defined an age

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph By Jan Swafford

Taken by Storm

Instant Gratification

As the economy gets ever better at satisfying our immediate, self-serving needs, who is minding the future?

Biofashionista

The Big Uneasy

A city’s seamy side

Empire of Sin By Gary Krist

Solar Complexus

We may be alone after all

The Copernicus Complex By Caleb Scharf

Carnival of the Animals

The Italian artist Carpaccio cast a careful, loving eye on his many nonhuman subjects

Anything Goes

Prose for the people

The Sense of Style By Steven Pinker

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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