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Looking For Frederick Douglass
How a visit to his birthplace helped me understand this moment in America
Anubian Kingdom Rises
Excavations at a city on the Nile reveal the origins of an ancient African power
What a Dame!
The late Vera Lynn – Oldie of the Year in 2018 and a great friend to the magazine – wrote her last piece for us in May, aged 103
Profitable Wonders: Batting for bats
Besides elegantly wielding his bat at the crease, former England Captain David Gower is a long-standing admirer of the other, flying version.
Christopher Robin did adore his bear
He told me he loved Winnie-the-Pooh – and his father, AA Milne
A Plague is an Apocalypse But It Can Bring a New World
The meaning of this one is in our hands.
Under Review
BOOKS FOR THE GREAT PAUSE
The Romance of the Earth
Half a century ago, the profession of geologist was both popular and revered in Russia, shrouded in a halo of romance and adventure. Indeed, it was not unusual for the lives of these explorers of subterranean mysteries to be immortalized in motion pictures, or for songs to be written about them.
The Thimble
Pashka Bystrov, known around the village as Speedy, was leaning back against the warm stove and despondently watching his wife, Galka. Her hair still in curlers, she was tossing her dresses, skirts, and fleece tights into a suitcase, wadding up her feather-light stockings, and yelling at him that she was sick up to here, and then some, with village life, and she wanted to hear her heels tapping on asphalt and get a proper salon perm.
“Painting Jesus Isn't Dangerous”
Orthodox Street Art in Contemporary Russia
Journeys through the Russian Empire
WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Russia prior to the Revolution, photographing churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes. His images are now archived at the Library of Congress. William Brumfield has recreated Prokudin-Gorsky’s journeys and photographed those same sites today and the photos are laid out side by side int his new book – a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.
Owls of the Eastern Ice
A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
Arctic Wake-up Call
Oil spill highlights Russia's deteriorating infrastructure
An expat Goes Home
At dawn one day in late November, I was awakened by a call. It was my niece, sobbing: “Uncle Vic… Papa died.”
A Cold Soup to Beet Summer
I was a picky eater in my childhood, and cooked vegetables were especially taboo for me, precluding any enjoyment of my mother’s scrumptious borshch, vegetable ragout, and the like. It must have been a small miracle for her, then, that I did eat her cold svekolnik (свекольник) soup. Perhaps I was seduced by its brilliant red color, or by the floating halves of a hard-boiled egg, or the fact that it was refreshingly cold on a hot summer day.
Kevin Kwan – The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety
Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians, celebrates and skewers the social codes of the wealthy and powerful.
A Sylk Road Renaissance
Excavations in Tajikistan have unveiled a city of merchant princes that flourished from the fifth to the eighth century A.D.
The Arrow That Saved My Life—Twice
After a freak backyard accident almost kills her, a Texas woman is taken on a miraculous medical journey
First Fiction 2020
In our twentieth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, Lauren Groff, Bryan Washington, Paul Lisicky, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sarah Gailey introduce first books by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Corinne Manning, Megha Majumdar, and John Fram.
A Poetics Of Resilience
In her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Natasha Trethewy contends with persistent trauma, both personal and cultural, going beyond witnessing to seek truth in all its complexity.
What We Found in Writing
ON THE evening Denver went into lockdown, I was fishing. The South Platte runs right through the city, and if you’re into urban fly-fishing, you can cast for huge carp among the wrecked grocery carts and old tires.
Save Indie Bookstores
Writers tend to have their favorite local book-stores. The one where the staff members are mostly poets.
“I Said to My Mother, ‘Did You See the Blood?' She Said, ‘I Hoped You Hadn't Noticed.'”
Marga Griesbach was sent to Stutthof concentration camp in 1944. This past February, she left Washington State to take a cruise around the world.
The Last Night Out
The virus pulled back the curtain on our fraught relationships.
What Takes Our Breath Away
An undertaker reflects on the one thing death can’t steal: our stories.
The Special Child
In his unsettling trilogy about a possibly divine boy, J. M. Coetzee asks how we recognize the truth when it enters the world.
Food & Drink
Babushka’s Victory Cake
Under Review
Under Review
The Secret of Scooby-Doo's Enduring Appeal
Why on earth has the formulaic series, which debuted half a century ago, outlasted just about everything else on television?
The Beauties
I. I remember when I was still in high school in the fifth or sixth level, I traveled with my grandfather from the village of Bolshaya Krepkaya in the Don region to Rostov-on Don.