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?

The End Is Only the Beginning

Our species may soon evolve, with the help of technology, into something more than human

The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?

Read Alice Walker’s first published essay, which won first place in our 1967 essay contest

I Am Become a Name

The uncle I never knew and the war that was his

Foreign Af fairs

The many lives and loves of the mysterious Saint-John Perse

Anatomy of a Collision

The sudden intersection of one’s professional and parental identities can lead to a strange kind of work-life imbalance

The Road to Paradise and Back

Fires in the West, hurricanes in the East—what it’s like on the ground as we confront our rapidly changing world

The Corals and the Capitalist

The key to avoiding an ecological catastrophe might be found in the wealth of nations and the spirit of innovation

An Artist of Our Social Age

Matthew Wong broke all the rules and flourished online, but he craved what the outsider typically eschews: commercial success

Rooms With a View

A childhood in Haifa—before Israel attained statehood and just after—helped form an architect’s vision of what an ideal home should be

A Monstrous Burden

The original Godzilla illuminates the plight of  Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, but what can it say about the present, about the violence endured by Asian Americans during Covid-19?

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