Taking It to the Street

What it’s like to be down and out in America

Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an IdeaBy Mitchell Duneier / Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City By Matthew Desmond

All Fall Down

Tackling America’s aging infrastructure problem

A New Heaven and a New Earth

During the Spanish Civil War, an alternative vision of society briefly flourished in Barcelona

All the World’s a Page

Crowdsourcing the Bard at the Folger Shakespeare Library

The Pursuit of Middle Heaven

Missives about sex, love, and the value of really good talk

Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 Edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe

I Will Love You in the Summertime

Between the rupture of life and the rapture of language lies a world of awe and witness

Mapping a Hard Place

I Think, Therefore …

How much can we really know about the mystery of ourselves?

The Tides of the Mindby David Gelernter / On Being Human by Jerome Kagan

The Sound of Silence

Jean Sibelius and the symphony that never was

The Remains of My Days

Fond and fading memories of a robust literary life

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

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

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

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