Potted History

Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet

Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave By Leonard Todd

Shaking Habit’s House

Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert

How Fiction Works By James Wood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Preparation of a Lifetime

Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again By Roger H. Martin

Over There

A pugnacious public intellectual looks to Europe for his ideal

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century By Tony Judt

Democracy in Three Dimensions?

How the nation’s capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves

Washington: The Making of the American Capital By Fergus M. Bordewich

Ireland Revised

Where the Celtic Tiger came from, and where it has gone

Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000 By R. F. Foster

Repatriating Art

A museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage By James Cuno

A Look Beyond the Tragic Mystique

Posthumous Keats By Stanley Plumly

The Art of Doing

Let’s give our hands a great big hand

The Craftsman By Richard Sennett

A Dangerous Weapon

The fault is not in the camera, but in ourselves

The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America By Louis P. Masur

Heart of Semi-Darkness

A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors

Masters of Horror and Magic

The German folklorists who helped build a nation

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

Imperiled Planet

The ecological havoc we’ve wrought

The Burning Earth: A Historyby Sunil Amrith

Ground Truth

A story of dirt, dollars, and death

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippiby Wright Thompson

Insisting on the Positive

A popular historian’s philosophical musings

On Freedomby Timothy Snyder

A Stranger in the Seven Hills

A refugee’s experience in the Eternal City

Roman Year: A Memoirby André Aciman

Mortal Coils

We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable

Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Deathby Susana Monsó

Silent Partner

The union that may have made possible a writer’s late flourishing

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevensonby Camille Peri

Schmaltz of Significance

How the first talkie treated the myth of the melting pot

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singerby Richard Bernstein

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