Milking the G.O.A.T.

Why are we so obsessed with anointing the very best?

Mortal Music

Franz Schubert, silence, and the final reckoning

Night Visitors

The power of music at a New York City soup kitchen

Not Your Parents’ New York Phil

Opening night at David Geffen Hall was an attempt to reconcile with an institution’s past and map out a way for the future

Don’t Tell the Tourists

Hollywood’s surprising links to the antebellum South

At Home in the Asylum

Seventy-five years later, the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto still speaks to the madness of India’s Partition

A Royal Disappointment

Am I the only Black woman in America who thinks Bridgerton is trash?

The Bully in the Ballad

Was Mississippi John Hurt really the first person to sing the tragic tale of Louis Collins?

Enough Already with the Trauma

Learning to live with your inner mishegas

One Man’s Trash

In the windswept California desert, Noah Purifoy sculpted a visionary monument from the detritus of everyday life

Rules of Reciprocity

True empathy might be possible only if we can first get out of our own way

Portals to Eden

The gates on college campuses provide beauty and security, but they can also take on symbolic importance in times of campus tumult

Here We Are Again
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Helen Benedict’s novels about the Iraq war continue to resonate today

The Paper Chase
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A quiet crisis threatens millions of historical documents in some of the nation’s premier archives

Lisbon, 1989
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How longing, melancholy, nostalgia, and song came together on one memorable night

It’s All in Your Head
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What a remarkable thing it is to remember what you read

Save the Meramec

On law, literature, and the Indiana bat

Adding Wimsey to My Life

How I fell in love with a fictional detective

Any Way You Can

This is what can happen when you’re abandoned in a war zone

A Newer Species of Trouble

When the lines between natural and technological disasters become blurred— and ultimately erased

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