Winter 2016

Letter from the Aral Sea: All Dried Up

How the fourth-largest landlocked body of water on earth almost disappeared

Cellspeak

Where the Heart Is

A grandmother’s life in five moves, from Hitler’s Europe to the American Midwest

Jacob A. Riis: The Other Half

A retrospective at the Museum of the City of New York

Real Papa

Painkillers

Four Poems

Delicious poems from the paintings of four masters

Back to the Country

Keeping the pastoral dream alive

Hot Rocks

A scientist’s love of lava

The Last Volcano: A Man, a Romance, and the Quest to Understand Nature’s Most Magnificent Fury By John Dvorak

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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