Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
By Jay Neugeboren
July 18, 2024To Catch a Sunset
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
By Sandra Beasley
July 11, 2024The Next New Thing
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
By Witold Rybczynski
July 4, 2024Imperfecta
Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing
By Pamela Haag
June 20, 2024The Widower’s Lament
After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss
By Steven G. Kellman
March 4, 2024The 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
By John Dos Passos Coggin
April 13, 2023The 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
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
March 2, 2023Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
July 28, 2022The Believer
When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in
By Keri Walsh
June 15, 2022A Matter of Pride
The enduring legacy of Gentleman’s Agreement
By David Lehman
Monday, February 10, 2020The Ultimate Cost of Our Endless Wars
Could the debt alone deal a fatal blow to our democracy?
By Jerry Delaney
Tuesday, March 5, 2019Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969)
Jacques Barzun delivered this lecture half a century ago
By Jacques Barzun
Monday, March 4, 2019The Hedgehog’s Great Escape
A young Frenchwoman who ran the Allies’ most persistent spy group was in the Gestapo’s grasp
By Lynne Olson
Monday, March 4, 2019Orwell’s Last Neighborhood
While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four
By David Brown
Monday, March 4, 2019At Play in the Fields of the Bored
America’s newest city parks are chock-full of things to do—but what happened to the delights of idle time in a natural setting?