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The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

By Jonathan Liebson | Wednesday, January 8, 2025

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

By Megan Craig | Thursday, January 2, 2025

Double Exposure

On our first memories

By Jonathan Weiner | Monday, December 23, 2024

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

By Samantha Rose Hill | Monday, December 2, 2024

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

By Rosanna Warren | Monday, December 2, 2024

In the Mushroom

True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business

By Michael Autrey | Monday, December 2, 2024

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

By Janna Malamud Smith | Monday, December 2, 2024

Granaries of Language

Dictionaries are far more than alphabetized collections of words

By Ilan Stavans | Monday, December 2, 2024

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

By Rosanna Warren | Thursday, October 24, 2024

Thoreau’s Pencils

How might a newly discovered
connection to slavery change
our understanding of an abolitionist
hero and his writing?

By Augustine Sedgewick | Thursday, October 17, 2024

When 2+2=5

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

By Robert Orsi | Thursday, March 1, 2007

In Pursuit of Innocence

From the Spring 1953 issue of The Scholar

By Paul Sears | Thursday, March 1, 2007

The Judge’s Jokes

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

By John Barth | Thursday, March 1, 2007

The Apologist

The celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, appeared at the funeral of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him?