Capital of Willows
On a trip to North Korea, a writer remembers his troubled father, a victim of the “Forgotten War”
By Eben Wood
September 7, 2015Test of Faith
The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?
By Mark Edmundson
September 7, 2015Talk of the Town
At the Concord Lyceum, Emerson tried out his lectures on his neighbors
By Robert A. Gross
June 8, 2015Matters of Taste
A work of literature and a bottle of wine require similar skills of their respective critics
By Paul Lukacs
June 8, 2015The Wandering Years
Read the travel journals of literary icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died yesterday at 101
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
June 8, 2015My Mother’s Yiddish
The music of my childhood was a language filled with endearments and rebukes, and frequent misunderstandings
By Phyllis Rose
June 8, 2015Saigon Summer
A spy’s daughter remembers the haunting unreality of embassy life in South Vietnam before the fall
By Sara Mansfield Taber
June 8, 2015Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
By Jay Neugeboren
Thursday, July 18, 2024To Catch a Sunset
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
By Sandra Beasley
Thursday, July 11, 2024The Next New Thing
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
By Witold Rybczynski
Thursday, July 4, 2024Imperfecta
Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing
By Pamela Haag
Thursday, June 20, 2024The Widower’s Lament
After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss
By Steven G. Kellman
Monday, March 4, 2024The World at the End of a Line
The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea
By John Dos Passos Coggin
Thursday, April 13, 2023The Goddess Complex
A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
Thursday, March 2, 2023Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
Thursday, July 28, 2022The Believer
When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in