Winter 2005

Articles

The Glue Is Gone

The things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again?

by Edward Hoagland

So Help Me God

What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

by Ted Widmer

What We Got Wrong

How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions

by Lawrence Rosen

The Coming of the French

My life as an English professor

by Phyllis Rose

The Software Wars

Why you can't understand your computer

by Paul De Palma

The Crooner and the Physicist

Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass

by Jeremy Bernstein

A Sturdy Man

Notes on a human symphony

by Brian Doyle

Departments

Editor's Note

Fear Itself

Robert Wilson

Letters

Response to Our Autumn Issue

Our Readers

Book Essay

End of Discussion

End of Discussion

Why I’m leaving my book group

Suzanne Freeman

Book Reviews

Thoreau’s Landscape Within

How he came to know nature, and through it came to know himself

Kent C. Ryden

Rocket Men

A daughter explores the male-dominated universe of her father

Michael Upchurch

The Peculiar Intellectual

In the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery

Richard E. Nicholls

What Einstein Knew

One year and five papers that changed physics forever

Tony Rothman

One Bad Husband

What the “Bluebeard” story tells us about marriage

Alison Lurie