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

To the Rescue of Romanticism

From the Spring 1940 issue of The Scholar

Findings: For Jacques Barzun on his 100th Birthday

Wonder Bread

Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft

Unto Caesar

Religious groups that have allied themselves with politicians, and vice versa, have ignored at their peril the lessons of Roger Williams and U.S. history

The Trojan War

Now even some environmentalists are supporting the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. One man’s story suggests the industry can’t be trusted

Poetry Stand

How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand

Lady of the Lake

Writer Brenda Ueland and the story she never shared

Apologies All Around

Today’s tendency to make amends for the crimes of history raises the question: where do we stop?

Findings: Amateurism

From the Spring 1976 issue of The Scholar

● This week's archive pick

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