A Monstrous Burden

The original Godzilla illuminates the plight of  Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, but what can it say about the present, about the violence endured by Asian Americans during Covid-19?

One Man’s Trash

In the windswept California desert, Noah Purifoy sculpted a visionary monument from the detritus of everyday life

The Degradation Drug

A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior

Averted Vision

Seeing the world anew in the aftermath of family tragedy, through the lenses of physics and theology

Freedom Tales

Long before the contentious school board fights of today, Lydia Maria Child tried to help America’s children understand their country’s racial transgressions

Why We Are Failing to Make the Grade

Covid-19 has contributed to a crisis in America’s classrooms, but the problems predate the pandemic and are likely to outlast it

The Root Problem

Harvesting wild ginseng has sustained Appalachian communities for generations—so what will happen when there are no more plants to be found?

Autumn 2022

Ways of Being

Intimations of living and dying in the lines of Forrest Gander

Power of the Peoples

American history was shaped as much by Native Americans as by their colonizers

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

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

Double Exposure
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On our first memories

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

In the Mushroom
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True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

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