Autumn 2009

Cover Story

The Decline of the English Department

How it happened and what could be done to reverse it

by William M. Chace

Articles

The Doctor Is IN

At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside

by Daniel B. Smith

Notes from the Earth

Running Yangtze rapids, following Afghan herdsmen, four-wheeling Australia’s Jack Hills—intimate contacts with natural landscapes

by Barry Lopez

A Mindful Beauty

What poetry and applied mathematics have in common

by Joel E. Cohen

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

by Toby Lester

Mother Country

A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune

by Evelyn Toynton

Departments

Book Essay

Living on $500,000 a Year

Living on $500,000 a Year

What F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns reveal about his life and times

William J. Quirk

Book Reviews

A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life

Reading Joyce’s Ulysses as a guide to urban living

Sudip Bose

Art in the Time of War

A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony

Susannah Rutherglen

The Common Good

The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children

Richard D. Kahlenberg

Film Release

A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs

Shirley Streshinsky

Relativity and All That

Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation

Apurva Narechania

Watchers of the Skies

Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired

Robert Wilson