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?

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

Findings: Swept Away

The Glue Is Gone

The things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again?

So Help Me God

What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

What We Got Wrong

How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions

The Coming of the French

My life as an English professor

The Software Wars

Why you can’t understand your computer

The Crooner and the Physicist

Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass

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