The End of Driving

Yes, autonomous autos will make roads safer and more efficient, but what wonders will be lost?

Myths of Memory

Our ability to recall is not an undiluted gift

A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past by Lewis Hyde

Four Poems
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Paying to Be Locked Up

Private prison companies treat immigrant detainees like convicted criminals—and reap huge profits from the people they hold

New Zealand: Beauty and the Beef

Will the nation’s identity continue to be pastoral, or will its urbanites create a hip young image of environmental awareness?

The Delta Blues

A photographer documents former boomtowns in the South

A Pleasure to Read You

Shouldn’t literature enchant, surprise, and teach us? And to make this happen, shouldn’t we be the most expert readers we can be?

Fighting the Endless War

Four questions about the future of the U.S. military

Where the Sun Finally Set

A new look at the island empire’s prize possession

The British in India by David Gilmour

Black Lives and the Boston Massacre

John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve always understood it, the ultimate
expression of principle and the rule of law

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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