The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

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

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 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

Lives of the Artists

The vistas and losses of two great English painters

Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublimeby Stanley Plumly

Burma: The Lady and the Monk
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Her Too

A daughter calculates the cost of her mother’s electrical career

Autumn 2018

Four Poems
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“On Vacation,” “Stonehenge Sandwich,” “Creazzo Alto,” and “Orvieto Classico”

The End of Literature

Even if writing is reduced to tweeted epigrams to keep readers reading, won’t writers still tell stories?

Visual Music

Is it possible to “hear” a painting as if it were a fugue by Bach?

Summersville Lake

Scenes from West Virginia

Speech

News or Not?

When native advertising blends in too well

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