On Prayer
I’ve never tried it, but I suspect the world could use a lot more of it
By Edward Hoagland Monday, June 6, 2016
Bohemian Rhapsody
The troubled homeless historian who beguiled and bedeviled
By Sridhar Pappu Monday, June 6, 2016
Joe Gould’s Teeth By Jill Lepore
Common Sense
It’s time for police officers to start demanding gun laws that could end up saving their own lives
By Robert Wilson Monday, February 29, 2016
Hunger Pangs
What it means to want in a world of plenty
By Karen J. Coates Monday, February 29, 2016
Lives of the Philosophers
The postwar thinkers who stripped the world of preconceptions
By Amanda Vaill Monday, February 29, 2016
At the Existentialist Café By Sarah Bakewell
Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie
We must learn to humanize digital life as actively as we’ve digitized human life—here’s how
By James McWilliams Monday, February 29, 2016
Island Royalty
A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary
By Madison Smartt Bell Monday, January 13, 2025
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut
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
