To Die of Having Lived

A neurological surgeon reflects on what patients and their families should and should not do when the end draws near

My Brain on My Mind

The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember

The Stolen Election

An expatriate Iranian writer travels her troubled homeland in the weeks after a disputed presidential vote

Seventy Years Later

The Second World War destroyed Adolf Hitler, but his legacy is showing disturbing signs of life

Strange Matter

The physics and poetics of the search for the God particle

Wrestling with Two Behemoths

A longtime New Yorker, and New Yorker writer, gets the cold shoulder from powerful New York cultural institutions

Writing About Writers

Covering the book beat

The Doctor Is IN

At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside

The Decline of the English Department

How it happened and what could be done to reverse it

Notes from the Earth

Running Yangtze rapids, following Afghan herdsmen, four-wheeling Australia’s Jack Hills—intimate contacts with natural landscapes

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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