Tales From an Attic

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives

The Widower’s Lament
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After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

An Outrage Sacred to the Gods

As Antigone knows all too well, the act of burying a loved one is not always a simple matter

It All Begins in Love

An essayist sees glimpses of her parents and the many struggles they endured in a new exhibition of southern photography

Florida Man

Making a home in the Sunshine State when you feel like a perpetual outsider

Give Us Something to Look At

Why ornament matters in architecture

Shooting a Dog

During a deployment in Iraq, a young soldier confronts a fundamental paradox about the masculine temperament in wartime

In the Forest of the Colobus

At a Gambian nature reserve, troops of endangered monkeys—and numerous other creatures—enact a grand drama that plumbs the mysteries of life, death, and regeneration

Notes From the Front

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended

Alphabet of Despair

The photographic language of Dorothea Lange conveyed order and beauty in a dusty, impoverished America

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

Double Exposure
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On our first memories

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

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

Illustration by Aad Goudappel

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

The Weight of a Stone
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Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

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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