Medication Nation

Our increasing reliance on drugs—prescribed, over-the-counter, illegal, and ordered online like pizza—suggests we have a deeper problem

How Chemistry Became Biology

And how LUCA, Earth’s first living cell, became Lucas, my adorable grandnephew

Awakenings

The advent of new religions in the 1800s led to fierce debates that persist today

My Newfoundland

The sensations of landing on the island long ago haunted a writer’s final memories

A Life in Letters

A decades-long correspondence with the Italian writer Arturo Vivante covered it all: hardship, love, and the endurance of art

Where the Heart Is

A grandmother’s life in five moves, from Hitler’s Europe to the American Midwest

The Well Curve

Tropical diseases are undermining intellectual development in countries with poor health care—and they’re coming here next

The Sweet Briar Opportunity

Small colleges with too few applicants and large universities with too many should work together

Hope Is the Enemy

Caring for a patient suffering from dementia means coming to terms with the frustrating paradoxes of memory and language

The Mysteries of Attraction

Its many splendors do not only include the carnal: animate, inanimate … love it all

Rage, Muse

The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or forgotten

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament
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After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

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