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 Age by 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

Double Exposure
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On our first memories

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 Union by 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 Parts by Helen King

In the Mushroom
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True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

Palladio in the Rough

A South Carolinian builds classical revival houses that really look old

Fadeaway Jumper

A Sunday-afternoon player of a certain age says his farewell to basketball

Mae La: An Eden with Barbed Wire

Flat Time

The ebb and flow of life in a Newfoundland fishing village

Buster Brown’s America

How a Jew from Slovakia became a Catholic from Manhattan, then fell from grace and turned into a real American

A Visit to Esperantoland

The natives want you to learn their invented language as a step toward world harmony. Who are these people?

The Lieutenant

Inept in the art of warfare, this volunteer soldier succeeded on a different field

Brand-New Cities

Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Effect looks a lot like 1960s-style urban renewal

Lenny’s Little Chats

Envy the children who learned music from the maestro, Leonard Bernstein

The One Who Went Before

Remembering the playwright August Wilson, 1945-2005

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