China, Up Close

Inside the Box

How we became pod people

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace By Nikil Saval

4 Popes, 4 Saints, One New Guy

Perhaps you’ve heard the news from Rome. But what does it really have to do with the man from Assisi?

Learning Curves, Farming Angles

Keep Smiling

An agnostic sermon

Numbers Game

The problems of solutions

Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World By Amir Alexander

Dangerous Liaison

A CIA officer’s many faces

The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames By Kai Bird

On Visitors

When the Bachelor Girl and the Red Death come calling, are they mirrors for our eccentricities?

Who’d Have Thunk It?

Proust Goes to the Country Club

At a largely forgettable class reunion, remembrances of things past

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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