Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

What I Have Taught—and Learned

After 50 years as a professor, I understand that my job is to make students think hard about thinking

Woods.jpg
Essays [ssa_access]

Remains

Life on Eagle Pond Farm

Essays [ssa_access]

For Better and for Worse

The aftermath of a disorienting divorce

Essays [ssa_access]

Traveling Corpse

How an American sergeant’s journey through frigid North Russia inspired a work of historical fiction

Essays [ssa_access]

Leap

Essays [ssa_access]

Instant Gratification

As the economy gets ever better at satisfying our immediate, self-serving needs, who is minding the future?

Essays [ssa_access]

Why Science Is Not Enough

Only through our imagination can we know the world

Essays [ssa_access]

Going Haywire

Delusions can occur in perfectly “normal” people

Essays [ssa_access]

Frankfurt, Farewell

A family escaped the Nazis in 1939, finding refuge in America, but its hardships were far from over

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The 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

The 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

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

● This week's archive pick

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