Essays

Findings [ssa_access]

Findings: Richard E. Nicholls on Amateurism

Essays [ssa_access]

The Mystery of Ales

The argument that Alger Hiss was a WWII-era Soviet asset is flawed. New evidence points to someone else

Essays [ssa_access]

The Mystery of Ales (Expanded Version)

The argument that Alger Hiss was a WWII-era Soviet asset is flawed. New evidence points to someone else

Essays [ssa_access]

Love on Campus

Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor

Essays [ssa_access]

Remember Statecraft?

What diplomacy can do and why we need it more than ever

Essays [ssa_access]

Gazing Into the Abyss

The sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a “hope toward God”

Essays [ssa_access]

‘Mem, Mem, Mem’

After a stroke, a prolific novelist struggles to say how the mental world of aphasia looks and feels

Essays [ssa_access]

Between Two Worlds

The familar story of Pocahontas was mirrored by that of a young Englishman given as a hostage to her father

Essays [ssa_access]

Fragments of Paradise

Gardens like those of Friedrich II at Sanssouci help us to read the world

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

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