Books, Arts, and Culture

One could be forgiven for thinking that it’s only Senator Joe Manchin who gets to decide these things, but here’s a little-known fact: precisely 201 individuals...

In The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe gave the “Yamour” only a shrugging mention. Even now, it’s the least known (in the West)...

With the exception of Herman Melville, nineteenth-century American writers are better known for staying home than for venturing to exotic locales. Henry David Thoreau boasted that...

It’s a hallmark of countless films about the mafia: the craving for respectability, the yearning for legitimacy, the desire to go clean. The ur-scene is from...

One November day in the British Museum in London 150 years ago, a man called George Smith jumped up from the desk at which he had...

In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was...

When, on October 23, 1922, T.S. Eliot assembled and dispatched to the New York lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn a packet containing drafts of The Waste...

Stopping to see an old friend en route to California on horseback, the protagonist of Saddle Tramp (1950), a folksy ranch hand played by Joel McCrea,...

The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are “severely food insecure.” Forty million are in “emergency” conditions, one step short of the...

The cover of our Fall Books Issue was hand-drawn and -painted by Jon Klassen, the Canadian writer and illustrator of a Caldecott Award–winning picture book trilogy...