Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Buoyancy

In literature, as in life, the art of swimming isn’t hard to master

Exhortation [ssa_access]

The Broken Balance

The poet Robinson Jeffers warned us nearly a century ago of the ravages to nature we now face

Essays [ssa_access]

Passing the Torch

Why the eons-old truce between humans and fire has burst into an age of megafires, and what can be done about it

Essays [ssa_access]

The Liberal Imagination of Frederick Douglass

Honoring the emotions that give life to liberal principles

Essays [ssa_access]

What Kind of Father Am I?

Looking back at a lifetime of parenting sons and being parented by them

Essays [ssa_access]

Rome’s Gossip Columnist

When the first-century poet Martial turned his stylus on you, you got the point

Essays [ssa_access]

Shipwrecked

Like Robinson Crusoe after the storm, a daughter salvages what she can after her mother’s death

Essays [ssa_access]

A Slow Devouring

Banter, beer, and bar food smooth a disciplined but difficult passage through Finnegans Wake

Exhortation [ssa_access]

Who Cares About Executive Supremacy?

The scope of presidential power is the most urgent and the most ignored legal and political issue of our time

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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