The Wanderer
How a Victorian novelist’s life and times inform our own
By Michela Wrong Monday, December 4, 2017
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff
Tuskegee Truth Teller
Peter Buxtun, like many medical whistleblowers, got little thanks for exposing a notorious scandal
By Carl Elliott Monday, December 4, 2017
The Chief of Entertainers
Trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie was a jazz prophet, a musical genius, and a scatterbrained whirlwind
By David Grogan Monday, December 4, 2017
Bungle in the Jungle
A new biography considers what might have been in Indochina
By Charles Trueheart Monday, December 4, 2017
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot
Tales of War and Redemption
Even in the face of the ultimate human failing, we must be responsive to suffering and attuned to joy
By Phil Klay Monday, December 4, 2017
The Colonial Melting Pot
Six very different people in a war of liberation
By T. H. Breen Monday, December 4, 2017
Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom by Russell Shorto
About a Boy
Read an excerpt from a perpetual poem-in-progress
By David Lehman Monday, December 4, 2017
The Sound of Tinseltown
Toscha Seidel made a nation fall in love with the violin
By Adam Baer Monday, December 4, 2017
The Writer in the Family
The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero
By Jonathan Liebson Wednesday, January 8, 2025
The Weight of a Stone
Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology
By Megan Craig Thursday, January 2, 2025
Verde
Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew
By Jesse Lee Kercheval Thursday, December 12, 2024
Aging Out
Many of us do not go gentle into that good night
By Anne Matthews Thursday, December 5, 2024
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
By Samantha Rose Hill Monday, December 2, 2024
Divided Providence
Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War
By Robert Wilson Monday, December 2, 2024
Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine
The Fair Fields 
Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil
By Rosanna Warren Monday, December 2, 2024
Ideology as Anatomy
How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives
By Sierra Bellows Monday, December 2, 2024
Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King
