Unauthorized, But Not Untrue

The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats

Empathy and Other Mysteries

Neuroscientists are discovering things about the brain that answer questions philosophers have been asking for centuries

The Word Made Flesh

What writers do and what boxers do is more alike than you might imagine

To Accept What Cannot Be Helped

At 80, a woman with a fatal disease knows she doesn’t want to die in the hospital and discovers, with her family, what that really means

Forgiveness

The Seduction

After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students

Adonis

Expatriate’s Lament

The Passionate Encounter

A noted midcentury critic has much to say in his journal about his fellow writers and the literary world they shared

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

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

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