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

Remember Statecraft?

What diplomacy can do and why we need it more than ever

Gazing Into the Abyss

The sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a “hope toward God”

‘Mem, Mem, Mem’

After a stroke, a prolific novelist struggles to say how the mental world of aphasia looks and feels

Between Two Worlds

The familar story of Pocahontas was mirrored by that of a young Englishman given as a hostage to her father

Fragments of Paradise

Gardens like those of Friedrich II at Sanssouci help us to read the world

The Invasion of Privacy

From the Autumn 1958 issue of The Scholar

A New Theory of the Universe

Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation

When 2+2=5

Can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?

In Pursuit of Innocence

From the Spring 1953 issue of The Scholar

The Judge’s Jokes

Shards of memory, for better or for worse, from my father the after-banquet speaker

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