The Man Who Loved Cemeteries

Ted Ashton Phillips, Jr., 1959-2005

Findings: The Battered Trunk

Roosevelt Redux

Robert M. Ball and the battle for Social Security

End Game

The elderly are entitled to what they have earned

All About Eve

What men have thought about women thinking

A Long Cold View of History

How ice, worms, and dirt made us what we are today

Performance

Is there a genetic predisposition to sing Streisand on street corners?

Socrates' Mistake

The philosopher’s view of knowledge—forever demanding explanations, justifications, definitions, and criteria—is fantasy, and a dangerous fantasy

A Standard Oil Childhood

Oil refeneries, sand dunes, and other objects of beauty and affection

The Big Roundup

John Lomax roamed the West, collecting classic songs from the cowboy era

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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