Intimacy

Revisiting the gritty Roman neighborhood of his youth, a writer discovers a world of his own invention

Pullovers

Knitting a new life in America after a mother’s suicide, long ago in Japan

Her Own Society

When Emily Dickinson and her radical friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson met for the first time

The Bout

When George Plimpton, the boyish editor of The Paris Review, went three rounds with the light-heavyweight champion of the world

Buoyancy

In literature, as in life, the art of swimming isn’t hard to master

The Broken Balance

The poet Robinson Jeffers warned us nearly a century ago of the ravages to nature we now face

Passing the Torch

Why the eons-old truce between humans and fire has burst into an age of megafires, and what can be done about it

The Liberal Imagination of Frederick Douglass

Honoring the emotions that give life to liberal principles

What Kind of Father Am I?

Looking back at a lifetime of parenting sons and being parented by them

Rome’s Gossip Columnist

When the first-century poet Martial turned his stylus on you, you got the point

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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