Mightier Than the Sword

A celebrated cartoonist looks back on his singular life and career

Profusely Illustrated: A Memoir by Edward Sorel

A World Weird and Wondrous

A classical music star offers a peek behind the curtain

The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera by Matthew Aucoin

Sex and Secrets

Rare is the Hitchcock film that celebrates desire without disaster

If You Can’t See the Stage, Turn to the Page

With theaters shut during the pandemic, reading plays has shed surprising light on works both familiar and strange

Bartleby the Scrivener

If you’re dead or fictional, we’re the dating service for you!

Winter 2022

Responses to Our Autumn 2021 Issue

On Kindness

Almost everybody wants to be thought of as kind, if only as a strategy

At 90

The Submerged

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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