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

Whiskey Foxtrot One-One

My father was training to fight a war, but his real battle was with himself

Launching the Greatest Fleet

How American war surplus helped build the world’s most successful merchant marine

This Side of Paradise

Aging has its rewards until it doesn’t. I am ready to contemplate the end but not, yet, to give in to it

Where Did the Love Go?

Half-Century Reflections on 1968

March Madness

Why I Can’t Stand Little Women’s Jo March

Finding Time

Geochronologists establish precise dates for events that occurred eons ago

Dangerous Ground

When confronting matters of race, some boundaries are more easily breached than others

Present Tense

Even in this interminable drugstore line, my daughter’s last summer before college is slipping by far too quickly

My Family’s Siberian Exile

A writer pieces together the forgotten history of life in Stalin’s special settlements

● This week's archive pick

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