Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

How to Lose a War

Elizabeth D. Samet on the dangers of perpetual optimism

Paleolithic Passions

Charles Foster attempts to live—and think—as humans did 40,000 years ago

Spinning a Good Yarn

Once upon a time, Clara Parkes adopted a 676-pound bale of wool and got an inside look at a disappearing industry

Nature’s Pharmacy

How ethnobotany blends past and future medicine

People of the Parchment

The ordinary lives hidden in medieval manuscripts

The Sorceresses’ Amanuensis

Alice Hoffman on the conclusion of the Practical Magic series

Bite Club

Why the 17th-century vampire still haunts us today

Haunting the Homeland

Germany has all but forgotten the frenzy of witch trials and wonder doctors of the postwar period—but why?

A Literary Love Letter to Egypt

The story of Cairo’s first modern bookstore

Overconsumed

Adam Minter on what happens to all the stuff we downsize, declutter, and discard

Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things

American Horror Story

Jeremy Dauber on our obsession with fear

The Writing on the Wall

Augustine Sedgewick on his discovery of Henry David Thoreau’s connection to slavery

This Woman’s Work

Susannah Gibson opens the parlor doors on 18th-century feminism

Queen of the Night

Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark

A Toothsome Tale

Bill Schutt chomps through millennia to share the story of our pearly whites

A Rebel to Remember

Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner

Going for Gold

Joshua Prager on a forgotten Olympic gymnast whose 1904 record still hasn’t been beaten

Paradise Reclaimed

Olivia Laing on the dark histories and utopian dreams of the flower bed

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