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 Invasion of Privacy

From the Autumn 1958 issue of The Scholar

A New Theory of the Universe

Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation

When 2+2=5

Can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?

In Pursuit of Innocence

From the Spring 1953 issue of The Scholar

The Judge’s Jokes

Shards of memory, for better or for worse, from my father the after-banquet speaker

Peter Handke

The Apologist

The celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, appeared at the funeral of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him?

The Cook’s Son

The death of a young man, long ago in Africa, continues to raise questions with no answers

One Day in the Life of Melvin Jules Bukiet

A Manhattan writer runs afoul of the local penal system and lives to tell the tale

Findings: Privacy Revealed

From the Archives

● This week's archive pick

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