Tutors

My many mentors at Oxford, from Lincoln College to All Souls, linger like spirits in the mind

Eric Rohmer and Me

What a classic film from the French new wave taught me about the illusions of my youth

Leaks and Consequences

Why treating leakers as spies puts journalists at legal risk

Federal Student-Loan Sharks

Why is the government gouging our college kids? The new law on loan rates just makes things worse

To Live Is an Act of Courage

The crisis of suicide among our soldiers and veterans must end. Here’s how we can stop it

Is There a Word for That?

We have long invented language to fill gaps in our vocabulary, but not all coinages are created equal

Lost and Found

An ancestral home holds the relics of a family’s past—and the promise of its future

The Number One Funeral Home

The memorial service for my father, the doctor who attended to Chiang Kai-shek, was no ordinary affair

Laughter and the Brain

Can humor help us better understand the most complex and enigmatic organ in the human body?

Ladies Last

After the Civil War, both women and black men struggled to win the vote. Why the men succeeded

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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