On Political Correctness

Power, class, and the new campus religion

Interstates

How My Italian-American husband ate his way into the good graces of my African-American family

The Cloistered Books of Peru

A convent in the Andes is home to a treasure trove of rare, and possibly unique, early volumes

Keeping Faith

After a loss from which there is no recovery, I turned to books—not for solace or forgetting, but simply to survive

The Ultimate Pawn Sacrifice

My brother’s life mirrored that of Bobby Fischer, the deeply troubled chess master

“We Must Not Be Enemies”

Progressives who wish for a less reactionary America could begin by trying to understand the Trump voter

Milton Friedman’s Misadventures in China

The stubborn advocate of free markets tangles with the ideologues of a state-run economy

The Life Unlived

On W. G. Sebald and the uncertainties of time

Good Neighbors

When beavers came between us and a farmer down the road, we knew something more was at stake

Homebodies

A life spent mainly in the company of cats has meant relishing the comforts of domesticity and solitude

Asteroid Hunters

The scientists and engineers who defend our planet day and night from potentially hazardous space rocks

Tiger Mom

At a forest preserve in India, a writer sees the world anew and learns how to focus her son’s restless mind

American Carthage
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Echoes from the ancient conflicts between Hannibal’s city and Rome continue to reverberate well into the present

Lessons From Harlem
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A white blues player’s streetside education

Maximalisma
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A professor endeavors to separate treasure from trash—before her children have to do it for her

Raspberry Heaven
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A yearly back-yard harvest opens a door to the divine

In the Matter of the Commas
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For the true literary stylist, this seemingly humble punctuation mark is a matter of precision, logic, individuality, and music

The Fair Fields

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

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

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

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