“My sense of being a child didn’t end with the discovery of a bloody rag from the Ku Klux Klan. But my feeling of time and context did change. A much larger world sprang into view. It would take years for me to find my own way in it, to make my own mistakes; that’s called growing up.”—Rosanna Warren, “The Fair Fields”

Plus: Samantha Rose Hill follows Thomas Mann to Switzerland, Michael Autrey hunts for porcini, and Megan Craig searches for stability in stone

“The scent of these tobacco flowers is so strong that it chases me around the garden. I ask Amy whether she is experiencing something similar, and she confirms that she, too, can feel the scent growing so thick that it seems it might, at any minute, become visible, hanging in the air around us.”—Leigh Ann Henion, “Moondance”

Plus: Augustine Sedgewick makes a new discovery about Thoreau, Joseph Horowitz brings Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler together, and Debra Spark cries foul … ball

“How many of us come to feel, as Steve did, that we’re waging the same struggle with normalcy to some lesser degree or another? … I learned from him that normal is the most profoundly craved thing when we don’t have it and the most effortlessly ignored thing when we do.”— Pamela Haag, “Imperfecta”

Plus: Joshua Prager on a forgotten Olympian, Mickalene Thomas and the art of remixing, new poetry from Ange Mlinko, and more

“Football is an undeniably militaristic endeavor. It’s about taking and defending ground. It’s also about winning and its inevitable corollary, losing. Nobody’s goal is to play for a tie. Armistices are never declared.”—Steve Yarbrough, “Strength and Conditioning”

Plus: Sierra Bellows on the suitcases found at a New York State mental hospital, Amitav Ghosh on India’s Chinese influences, Emily Bernard on the power of a name

“Although I was a tall, skinny, clumsy, stuttering, insecure boy from northeastern Ohio, I represented a global superpower, the greatest army—allegedly—the world had ever known.”—Hugh Martin, “Shooting a Dog”

“And like soldiers who … gazed at photographs of wives and children as they lay dying on the field, so too modern Americans improvised, saying goodbye to their kin not face-to-face but with iPads.”—Drew Gilpin Faust, “A Turn to the Dark Side”

“Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. … For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.”—Tamara Dean, “Night Vision”

“Tinnitus means I hear things that don’t exist. The sounds are real to me, they exist in my subjective reality, but they cannot be heard by others.” —Caitriona Lally, “Phantoms”

Plus: Elizabeth Kadetsky on what a set of stolen stone goddesses can tell us about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking; Matthew Denton-Edmundson imagines an animal rights movement not based on suffering; and John Dos Passos’s grandson reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

“Doesn’t it feel like we are in the midst of an elemental comeuppance? During my travels, I keep having the strange sense that I am living in the future, the same future that was predicted by scientists when I was younger but one that has arrived much faster than many of us expected.”—David Gessner, “The Road to Paradise and Back”

Plus: Juli Berwald on capitalism and the coral reefs, Jessica Love on the collision of personal and parental identities, and Robert Zaretsky on Mary Wollstonecraft’s marriage advice

“In an age of many such distressing ecological changes, ginseng’s decline is notable because of the plant’s deep cultural significance. For root diggers, ginseng embodies an oddly contradictory set of American rural values—cultural pluralism and
national pride, communal life and rugged self-reliance.”—Matthew Denton-Edmundson, “The Root Problem”

Plus: Claire Stanford on Godzilla and Covid-19, Carl Elliott on mind-bending medications, and Sierra Bellows on the art of Matthew Wong