19th Nervous Breakdown

The struggle to keep it together

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind By Scott Stossel

Cure for Helmet Hair?

A Danger to Ourselves

Tough on other species, too

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History By Elizabeth Kolbert

What Killed My Sister?

The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions

Whores de Combat

In search of adventure and engagement

Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War By Amanda Vaill

Eight Hours a Slave

Plangent Encounters

The Fabulist

A literary critic’s ugly deception

The Double Life of Paul De Man By Evelyn Barish

On Loneliness

We value our solitude until it pinches

The Making of PoBiz Farm

After it became our permanent home, we overfilled it with overloved horses and dogs

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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