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

Two Strangers, Three Stories

All the lonely people and where they come from

Shouldn’t There Be a Word … ?

The holes in our language and the never-ending search for words to fill them

The Idea of Bombay

Bollywood epitomized modernity for a boy in a distant province. As an adult, he sees a troubled city.

Henry James vs. the Robber Barons

Why Italian art should stay in England, where it belongs, and not fall into the hands of foreigners

Findings: Birdman of America

The New Anti-Semitism

First religion, then race, then what?

My Holocaust Problem

If we cannot speak of it—though speak of it we must—how do we remember what happened to the Jews of Europe?

Palladio in the Rough

A South Carolinian builds classical revival houses that really look old

Fadeaway Jumper

A Sunday-afternoon player of a certain age says his farewell to basketball

● This week's archive pick

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