The Privilege Predicament

Yes, advantage exists, but has the promiscuous casting of blame enhanced the work of understanding?

Literary Life on the Rocks

A writer’s own ordeal highlights the banal sameness of addiction

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison

Educating Lillian

An excerpt from the forthcoming novel Children Made of Fire

Of a Fire on the Marsh

The last days of the dusky seaside sparrow, a species that went extinct when it lost out to the moon race

A Planet in Peril

Can humanity engineer its way out of trouble?

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

Ships of Pearl

Secrets of the cephalopods

A Blessing and a Curse

A Window on Europe

How a tsar turned a fetid bog into an imperial capital

St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva by Jonathan Miles

When Death Came to Golden

A writer’s strange entanglement with one of the 20th century’s most prolific serial killers

Galleries of the World

An interview with the Met’s Daniel H. Weiss

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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