Two Formalists
Remembering Thom Gunn and Anthony Hecht
By Langdon Hammer Wednesday, December 1, 2004
So Help Me God
What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history
By Ted Widmer Wednesday, December 1, 2004
What We Got Wrong
How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions
By Lawrence Rosen Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Point and Shoot
How the Abu Ghraib images redefine photography
By Andy Grundberg Wednesday, December 1, 2004
The Coming of the French
My life as an English professor
By Phyllis Rose Wednesday, December 1, 2004
The Software Wars
Why you can’t understand your computer
By Paul De Palma Wednesday, December 1, 2004
"I Can’t Believe I’m Doing It with Madame Bovary"
Learning to write musical comedy
By Jonathan Karp Wednesday, December 1, 2004
In Praise of Flubs
The pursuit of perfection has taken all the personality out of recorded classical music
By Sudip Bose Wednesday, December 1, 2004
The Peculiar Intellectual
In the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery
By Richard E. Nicholls Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South By Michael O’Brien
The Writer in the Family
The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero
By Jonathan Liebson Wednesday, January 8, 2025
The Weight of a Stone
Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology
By Megan Craig Thursday, January 2, 2025
Verde
Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew
By Jesse Lee Kercheval Thursday, December 12, 2024
Aging Out
Many of us do not go gentle into that good night
By Anne Matthews Thursday, December 5, 2024
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
By Samantha Rose Hill Monday, December 2, 2024
Divided Providence
Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War
By Robert Wilson Monday, December 2, 2024
Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine
The Fair Fields 
Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil
By Rosanna Warren Monday, December 2, 2024
Ideology as Anatomy
How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives
By Sierra Bellows Monday, December 2, 2024
Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King
