Notes from the Earth

Running Yangtze rapids, following Afghan herdsmen, four-wheeling Australia’s Jack Hills—intimate contacts with natural landscapes

Labor

Art in the Time of War

A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II By Ilaria Dagnini Brey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Mindful Beauty

What poetry and applied mathematics have in common

The Common Good

The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools By E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

Film Release

A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits By Linda Gordon

Mother Country

A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune

Relativity and All That

Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation

Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Watchers of the Skies

Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes

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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