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 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

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
loading

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

Look Out!

Why did it take so long to protect
spectators of America’s favorite pastime?

A Giant of a Man

The legacy of Willie Mays and the Birmingham ballpark where he first made his mark

Adventures With Jean

Striking up a friendship with an older writer meant accepting the risk of getting hurt

A Poet of the Soil

The legacy of a writer who struggled with his celebrity

The Letters of Seamus Heaneyselected and edited by Christopher Reid

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

Teach the Conflicts

It’s natural—and right—to foster
disagreement in the classroom

Others

Too many people in the world isn’t the problem—people are the problem

Anchoring Shards of Memory

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both
composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present

Autumn 2024

Moondance

Experience the marvel that is
night-blooming tobacco

● NEWSLETTER

Please enter a valid email address
That address is already in use
The security code entered was incorrect
Thanks for signing up