Tea and Fantasy

Fact, fiction, and revolution in an American town

Education Is My Mother and My Father

How the Lost Boys of Sudan found their way

Teaching the N-Word

A black professor, an all-white class, and the thing nobody will say

The Rise and Fall of David Duke

Breaking the code of right-wing populism in Louisana

Chekhov’s Journey

Finding the ideal of freedom in a rugged prison colony

Beaten Boys and Frantic Pets

A close reading of Tom Sawyer reveals why Mark Twain isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks he is

Custom and Law

After the death of his father, a not-notably observant Jew turns to the mourning rituals of his faith

Accidental Elegance

How chance authors the universe

Genome Tome

Twenty-three ways of looking at our ancestors

Turning the Tide

How Rachel Carson became a woman of letters

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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