September 2021

Like Tantalus, classical scholars are forever glimpsing things they cannot taste, or experience, themselves. Phalanx warfare was so common in ancient Greece that most freeborn males...

The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”);...

How can educated, functional adults swallow venomous and fantastical narratives about their neighbors and compatriots? Five years ago that question might have seemed quaint; widespread belief...

The story sounds almost too good to be true. Its ingredients are a boxful of old letters stored in the attic of his house by a...

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” Thoreau wrote in his 1862 essay “Walking,” “unless I spend four hours a day at least—and...