Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

Essays [ssa_access]

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

Essays [ssa_access]

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Essays [ssa_access]

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

Essays [ssa_access]

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

Essays [ssa_access]

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

Essays [ssa_access]

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

Essays [ssa_access]

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

Ulysses at 100 [ssa_access]

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

The Insidious Ethic of Conscience

Gregory Peck in "Gentleman's Agreement"

A Matter of Pride

The enduring legacy of Gentleman’s Agreement

Close-up photo of an orchid

L’Après-Midi d’un Minimalist Writer

Summer on the Sweet Grass

Notes from a Montana ranch

The Ultimate Cost of Our Endless Wars

Could the debt alone deal a fatal blow to our democracy?

Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969)

Jacques Barzun delivered this lecture half a century ago

The Hedgehog’s Great Escape

A young Frenchwoman who ran the Allies’ most persistent spy group was in the Gestapo’s grasp

Orwell’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

At 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?

● This week's archive pick

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