What the things we make with our hands tell us about ourselves

How a moving essay on war and suffering sprang from a childhood book

How charter schools and other private measures undermine a public good

How the artistic avant-garde made a modern China

How climate change and disease might have been the real killers

A composer and a neuroscientist unravel the story of human creativity

Cullen Murphy on growing up in the golden age of make-believe

On being a Regency fanboy, and America’s weird relationship with sex

Literature in translation—including the first fiction ever published in English from Madagascar and Tibet

Burial practices around the world, from mummies to dancing skulls, and the history of magic’s bad girls