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

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend
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How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

What Einstein Knew

One year and five papers that changed physics forever

Einstein 1905: The Standard of GreatnessBy John S. Rigden /The Einstein Almanac By Alice Calaprice

The Crooner and the Physicist

Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass

One Bad Husband

What the “Bluebeard” story tells us about marriage

Secrets Behind the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives By Maria Tatar

The Industrial-Strength Humanist

J. Irwin Miller knew how to get things built

A Sturdy Man

Notes on a human symphony

Findings: Another Washington Leak

The Thanksgiving Table

Mowing

Taking Leave

Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel

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