Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1906–08. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums Cambridge Mass At his death, in 1944,...
February 17, 2023 It is sometimes lamented that literature says too little about friendship. Lately though, counterexamples seem to be...
January 29, 2023 Shirin Ebadi’s troubles may have begun on the playground, when she discovered an inner compulsion to defend underdogs....
Sunday, November 27, 2022 Amid the ongoing tide of mass shootings, the case of Dylann Roof remains chillingly distinct. One evening in...
October 30, 2022 How did we wind up with Trump? The question should have been handed off to historians long ago. Instead, we wake to it...
Anya KamenetzWILL O'HARE
July 31, 2022 Several years ago, my former Providence Journal colleague Carol McCabe mentioned that she had been one of the young women...
June 26, 2022 John Cheever knew a vanishing world when he saw one. In a memorable introduction, he linked his collected stories to a time...
May 29, 2022 Repressive states tend to like their authors best when they are safely dead. Joseph Stalin admired Nikolai Gogol but...
April 24, 2022 One day in 2007, Russian hackers took down key online services in Estonia. This action, now generally recognized as the...
March 27, 2022 Fifty years ago, Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for president of the United States. The response was widely,...
February 27, 2022 Who should speak for or about rural Americans is perennially up for grabs. For a while, it was J.D. Vance, whose...
January 30, 2022 Lucas Bessire suffers from what Elizabeth Hardwick has called the stain of place. He tried running away from home to...
December 26, 2021 Show of hands: who’s up for another sheet-pan recipe? Just as I thought. In the roughly two years since the pandemic...
November 21, 2021 Since its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has proven an elusive symbol of the nation’s identity: by...
October 24, 2021 After days of immersing myself in the state of US college admissions, the story I could not shake was this: In 2015,...
September 27, 2021 Sometimes the impulse to seek our own image in nature runs aground. Consider the anglerfish. The female — beady-eyed,...
July 25, 2021 In July, the summer people fan out to homes in Maine. For those who can only fantasize, books set in the state offer a fine...
June 27, 2021 Fifty years ago, on June 27, Daniel Ellsberg distributed his last remaining copies of what are now known as the Pentagon...
May 23, 2021 In the 1830s, curious Americans paid 25 cents apiece to see Joice Heth, an elderly Black woman reputed to have been George...