The Bout

When George Plimpton, the boyish editor of The Paris Review, went three rounds with the light-heavyweight champion of the world

Antarctica: Cold Comfort

The National Science Foundation funds dozens of projects in Antarctica to study the effects of climate change. As U.S. government agencies are stripped of their funding and autonomy, read this piece to remind yourself of the importance of scientific research.

Unpulled Punches

A Most Interesting Young Man

Was that Bob Dylan my sister met on a weir above Woodstock?

The Art of Surprise

Syncopated Clock, Indeed

On Leroy Anderson’s centennial, a defense of the popular composer from an orchestra’s stage

After Callimachus

Buoyancy

In literature, as in life, the art of swimming isn’t hard to master

Symbols

A Look Beyond the Tragic Mystique

Posthumous Keats By Stanley Plumly

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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