The End of the Black American Narrative

A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences

Over There

A pugnacious public intellectual looks to Europe for his ideal

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century By Tony Judt

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

Democracy in Three Dimensions?

How the nation’s capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves

Washington: The Making of the American Capital By Fergus M. Bordewich

Her Own Society

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

Ireland Revised

Where the Celtic Tiger came from, and where it has gone

Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000 By R. F. Foster

Six Poems

Repatriating Art

A museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage By James Cuno

The Bout

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

The Resistance Fighter as Philosopher

Remembering Vladimir Jankélévitch

Winter Sun

“The Vow” by Yuliya Musakovska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Lindsey Weber

Relationships that define us

“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”

Five new prompts

In the Endless Arctic Light

A journey to the far north of Norway means confronting our changing climate

The Bears

“Faustina, or, Rock Roses” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Family/History

David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equationby Kenneth Turan

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