Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

The View from 90

Even when those in my generation have reached a state of serenity, wisdom, and relative comfort, what we face can hardly be called the golden years

Essays [ssa_access]

Baseball’s Loss of Innocence

When the 1919 Black Sox scandal shattered Ring Lardner’s reverence for the game, the great sportswriter took a permanent walk

Essays [ssa_access]

Unauthorized, But Not Untrue

The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats

Essays [ssa_access]

Empathy and Other Mysteries

Neuroscientists are discovering things about the brain that answer questions philosophers have been asking for centuries

Essays [ssa_access]

To Accept What Cannot Be Helped

At 80, a woman with a fatal disease knows she doesn’t want to die in the hospital and discovers, with her family, what that really means

Essays [ssa_access]

The Seduction

After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students

Essays [ssa_access]

The Passionate Encounter

A noted midcentury critic has much to say in his journal about his fellow writers and the literary world they shared

Essays [ssa_access]

Reassessing Rossellini

Restoration of Rome Open city, the director’s masterpiece, prompts a look at why he later retreated from the neorealism it introduced

Essays [ssa_access]

Prozac for the Planet

Can geoengineering make the climate happy?

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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