We Drink So We Can Trust Each Other

The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming....

Architecture Can Heal Us

Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”

The National Archives Deletes Our Problematic Past

Slavery, the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, the birth control pill--all much too messy and confrontational to remember.

Saying Grace

It is heartening (and this is a measure of where we have been) to remember that civility is not dead, not abandoned, not impossible, not a waste of breath.

Pronouns Are Ruining Our Lives

We need to abolish pronouns altogether. And not for the reason you think.

Election Day in a Small Town in Southern Illinois

“Both the media and the politicians benefit from keeping us divided. They push us to the extremes, because that is where the clicks and the money are.”

Conclave Breaks the Seal of Secrecy

This extraordinary film reveals the Vatican’s secretive and shadowy aspect, easily seen as sinister but felt by insiders as plain necessity.

Gossip from the Hôtel Biron, Where Paris’s Later-Famed Artists Were Housemates

Rodin, Camille Claudel, a free-spirited dancer named Isadora Duncan, nineteen-year-old Jean Cocteau, the painter Henri Matisse, and Rainer Maria Rilke--all housemates at a shabby hotel in Paris. Imagine the drama.

What if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Had Never Met?

What a wild coincidence, that Lewis and Tolkien were buddies at Oxford. Except, an acclaimed new graphic novel suggests, it was not coincidence at all

Is It Time to Drop the Penny?

That tiny copper disc has become irrelevant, an annoyance, yet one with a rich history. Does it still have a point to make?

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