What Killed My Sister?

The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions

On Loneliness

We value our solitude until it pinches

The Making of PoBiz Farm

After it became our permanent home, we overfilled it with overloved horses and dogs

The Presence of Absence

Our losses give vitality to our lives

A Whole Day Nearer Now

But all life’s passion not quite spent

Where Are the People?

Evangelical Christianity in America is losing its power—what happened to Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral shows why

My Kingdom for a Wave

If your life as a public intellectual takes you to the highest crests, be prepared for the troughs that follow

My Friend Melanie Has Breast Cancer

How it might have happened, and why we are looking in the wrong places to prevent similar cases

Homeless in the City

A writer describes the decade he has spent living on the streets

Our Farm, My Inspiration

How a weekend getaway became a poet’s muse

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

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

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

In the Mushroom
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True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

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

Illustration by Aad Goudappel

Granaries of Language
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Dictionaries are far more than alphabetized collections of words

Reborn in the City of Light

At a time when Paris was an incubator of modernism, a group of bold American women arrived to make art out of their lives

Thoreau’s Pencils

How might a newly discovered
connection to slavery change
our understanding of an abolitionist
hero and his writing?

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