The Daily Miracle

Life with the mavericks and oddballs at the Herald Tribune

Cuss Time

By limiting freedom of expression, we take away thoughts and ideas before they have the opportunity to hatch

Alone at the Movies

My days in the dark with Robert Altman and Woody Allen

Balanchine’s Cabinet

A young woman wins a drawing and learns to give and to receive

Confluences

As a beloved uncle makes his final journey in the wilderness, a new life begins

Findings: Meditations on the Literature of Spying

From the Spring 1965 issue of The Scholar

The Cradle of Modernism

From the Autumn 1990 issue of The Scholar

To the Rescue of Romanticism

From the Spring 1940 issue of The Scholar

Wonder Bread

Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft

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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