Know Me Come Eat With Me

In the world of Ulysses, food turns out to be everything

It Happened One Day in June

Why Ulysses is as vital as ever— compelling, complex, and direct

For the Joy of Joyce

Abandon the notion of high-minded seriousness and simply enter into the novel’s flow

The Bomb Next Door

Eighty years into the atomic age, U.S. nuclear power reactors have produced several million tons of radioactive waste—and we still have no idea how to dispose of it

The Lions and the San

How could a people survive for thousands of years with so many predators in their midst?

Confessions of a Cyclist

Traversing New York City on two wheels can be both life-affirming and perilous

The Scar on the Hand

Writers and the early loss of parents

The Last Naturalist

A zoologist happiest in the fields and streams of Ohio wrote major works about the state’s birds and fishes

American Mandarins

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?

Safer Than Childbirth

Abortion in the 19th century was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy

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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