The Fair Fields

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

Just Yesterday

“The Frog Prince” by Stevie Smith

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr

Burned

“The White Heart of God” by Jack Gilbert

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Paige Ledom

Out of the ordinary

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine

Bring Out Your Dead and Plant a Tree

Five questions about the future of dying

Why We Need Art

Can evolutionary biology explain the human impulse to create?

The Origins of Creativityby Edward O. Wilson

What Is Freedom of Conscience?

Its long history in Europe and England prepared the American Revolution. Where has this trait gone?

Park Harvest

How people interact with nature—in the city

The Wanderer 

How a Victorian novelist’s life and times inform our own

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global Worldby Maya Jasanoff

Tuskegee Truth Teller

Peter Buxtun, like many medical whistleblowers, got little thanks for exposing a notorious scandal

The Chief of Entertainers

Trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie was a jazz prophet, a musical genius, and a scatterbrained whirlwind

Bungle in the Jungle

A new biography considers what might have been in Indochina

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnamby Max Boot

So You Think You Can Dance

Dancing across cultural lines

Tales of War and Redemption

Even in the face of the ultimate human failing, we must be responsive to suffering and attuned to joy

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