Essay States of War Storm Warning By Caleb Carr Are there meaningful parallels between America today and late imperial Rome, and will they suffer a similar fate? More
Essay Memory The Sensitive Plant By Virginia Morell The two-hundred-year search for botanical memory. More
Essay Medicine Course of Illness By Iain Bamforth Reconsidering an epic of illness—Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. More
Essay Intoxication Last Testaments By Francine Prose What do artists and writers do when they are faced with the imminence of death? Francine Prose reviews the final works of historian Tony Judt. More
Essay Disaster The Anomaly of Barbarism By John Gray The brutality of Islamist terrorism has many precedents. More
Essay States of Mind The Difficult Task of the Future By Damion Searls Carl Jung’s fight to find psychological types. More
Essay Intoxication Fabled Powers By Sven Birkerts For an artist, a day of successful inspiration is also a day a systematic intoxication. More
Essay Energy Truth Actually By Tom Roston A tour through a century of climate-change documentaries. More
