A Seductive Spectacle

The languid bazaar of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet still beckons 50 years later

Wide World

An essayist and activist who makes eloquent connections

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics By Rebecca Solnit

The Meandering Naturalist

A Wanderer All My Days: John Muir in New England By J. Parker Huber

Magical Mind

Albert Einstein’s life

EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe By Walter Isaacson

Dismantling the Dream

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America By Daniel Brook, Henry Holt

Response to Our Winter Issue

A New Theory of the Universe

Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation

When 2+2=5

Can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?

In Pursuit of Innocence

From the Spring 1953 issue of The Scholar

The Judge’s Jokes

Shards of memory, for better or for worse, from my father the after-banquet speaker

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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