Rome Was His Laboratory
No one in Rome would let Francesco Bianchini punch a hole through their ceiling. Bianchini wanted to measure the size of the solar system, which required...
Endless Summer
In September 1963 my family moved from Clarion, Iowa, to Osage, Iowa, eighty-two miles away. I was eleven, the oldest of four children. Both towns were...
Throngs of Unseen People
When eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid in the White House in February 1862, his parents were devastated. For weeks President Lincoln held solitary grieving sessions...
Timeless Correspondences
At the end of The Gift, a memoir of H.D.’s American childhood unpublished in her lifetime, she appends a chapter set in the present, London, 1943....
A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent
Among the thousands of cases the Supreme Court has decided, only a handful of dissenting opinions stand out. There is Justice John Marshall Harlan’s solitary dissent...
Little Town on the Prairie
Liang Village sits on the edge of the North China Plain, about 650 miles south of Beijing. The area was settled by migrants who came in...
Poet of the Dispossessed
Keiron Pim’s absorbing biography of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and disquieting writers begins with a description of Joseph Roth’s birthplace, a small town...
Doomed to Lucidity
Around ten years ago, the British writer Andrew Miller found himself in something of a crisis. Until then, his career had been a pretty gilded one....
Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It
On April 9 of this year, The New York Times featured an obituary for Arthur D. Riggs, a scientist likely unknown to most readers. Riggs’s career...
