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

Fear Itself

Two Formalists

Remembering Thom Gunn and Anthony Hecht

So Help Me God

What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

What We Got Wrong

How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions

Point and Shoot

How the Abu Ghraib images redefine photography

The Coming of the French

My life as an English professor

Response to Our Autumn Issue

The Software Wars

Why you can’t understand your computer

"I Can’t Believe I’m Doing It with Madame Bovary"

Learning to write musical comedy

In Praise of Flubs

The pursuit of perfection has taken all the personality out of recorded classical music

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