The House at Belle Fontaine

Tamarack State

Arthur of Camelot

Remembering Arthur Schlesinger, a knight-errant with typewriter

The Short Reign of Fred Allen

Jack Benny’s comic rival starred in a program refiguring “Weekend Update” and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

History Revisited

Scoundrels

The Invasion of Privacy

From the Autumn 1958 issue of The Scholar

Two Poems

The Whirling Princess

How a little rich girl known as Pussy Jones became Edith Wharton, writing her way into the aristocracy of American letters

Edith Wharton By Hermione Lee, Alfred A. Knopf

The Heroic and the Crass

Case studies in American presidential backbone

Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 By Michael Beschloss, Simon & Schuster

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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