Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Put a Bird on It

How did a beguiling South American hummingbird end up in the basement of a Pennsylvania museum?

Essays [ssa_access]

Turbulence

Death can come at any time, from above or below, but life requires putting fear aside

Essays [ssa_access]

Thine as Ever, P. T. Barnum

A scholar offers three utterly fictitious letters he wishes the famous showman had written

Essays [ssa_access]

Little Bowls of Colors

Writing in a foreign language can reveal secrets long buried in our mother tongue

Essays [ssa_access]

The Taming of the Wild

As we celebrate the centenary of the National Park Service, a meditation on “the best idea that America ever had”

Essays [ssa_access]

The FBI, My Husband, and Me

What I know now about Ted, whose photographs documented the 1960s, and about J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to label him a Soviet spy

Essays [ssa_access]

The Truth About Dallas

Looking back at the investigation of the Kennedy assassination and the controversies that dogged it from the start

Essays [ssa_access]

The Other Woman

A mother’s devastating secret, and its many reverberations, present and past

Essays [ssa_access]

Flight Behavior

A restless traveler finds solace in the quiet beauty of the annual sandhill crane migration

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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