Cuts

Tunneling for Daylight

All hail the miraculous, tenacious carpenter bee

Thunder in Her Head

A new biography of a master choreographer

Errand into the Maze: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Deborah Jowitt

Black Cleopatra

How a recent Netflix series infuriated Egypt—and raised questions about color stratification and the social construct of race

Hey Siri, Call Webster

When it comes to learning new words, it’s not where you look them up that’s important

The Dawn

An Outrage Sacred to the Gods

As Antigone knows all too well, the act of burying a loved one is not always a simple matter

It All Begins in Love

An essayist sees glimpses of her parents and the many struggles they endured in a new exhibition of southern photography

Bicentennial Beginnings

Learning to write and learning to live, with Richard Wilbur as a guide

Florida Man

Making a home in the Sunshine State when you feel like a perpetual outsider

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

Double Exposure
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On our first memories

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

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

In the Mushroom
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True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

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

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