Count

Illustration of the body

How We Work

An anatomical tour of what it means to be human

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

Revisionism Revised

Whitewater river

The Girl Diving

A short excerpt from a novel-in-progress

Responses to Our Summer 2019 Issue

Black-and-white photo of two people talking

How I Learned to Talk

Conversation once offered entry into other people’s minds. Has that disappeared?

Autumn 2019

Sketches by Michelangelo

Chalking It Up
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The ideas Michelangelo committed to paper were themselves glimpses of heaven

Sin

“It was enough that I was there, mutely listening as he recited his sorrowful dreams, or spooled out what he called his misgivings, his guilts, his remorse.”

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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