It is my impression that the modern phase of science and of scholarship began with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here exploring and exploiting became synonymous, and the collection of…

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An American adult today has, in his ordinary lifetime, virtually spanned ages. His mind and imagination have been confronted with the demand that they make room for five traditional lifetimes’…

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At stake was more than some Caribbean island. America itself, one elder statesman informed the president, faced a crucial test “in the great struggle between liberty and despotism.” Would the…

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I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100…

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This is the story of two scientists. Their search began five years ago with a single radiocarbon clue from the ocean floor. It led over many continents and seas, to…

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I heard about a rejection letter recently that deserves preservation in these days of big-time word-merchandising. “I cannot recall reading,” it said without irony, “a novel as learned, as intelligent,…

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What do most of us do when we notice a hungry, disoriented person slumped on the street in obvious despair? Why, we pass quickly by, averting our eyes toward an…

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In the beginning, when I first went West, I thought it was because I was in love with loneliness. Love of a certain kind of life and a certain kind…

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Funeral Pyre, by Rockwell Kent © Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York. Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl…

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St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of Gubbio promised to stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made pledges and assurances and pacts, and he kept his…

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I have just returned from forty-eight hours’ attendance at a bedside. My patient was a gentleman of forty who for eight years has habitually taken opium. He first learned its…

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It is often said that our Constitution is alive. As the Supreme Court reinterprets the law in different eras, our rights both grow and diminish—sometimes with glacial slowness, sometimes with…

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In Henry IV, the king on his deathbed gives his son and heir the ancient advice dear to the hearts of rulers in dire straits at home: I . .…

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The incongruity is the fascination of it all. In New York, the most modern of all large cities, the very embodiment of twentieth-century youth, thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries…

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This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with…

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I once awoke from a dream while crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend, and it was snowing hard. We had been talking, and there had been no…

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The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood…

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“I have just had a gratifying illustration of the conscientious perfection of the American people in enacting and enforcing a law when they are agreed that it is really for…

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Wise heads tell us we act first, or decide to act first, and reason afterward. What could be put down in black and white as to why we took up…

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I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed…

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We have perhaps created too much history too quickly—more than we can cope with. We know the cycles: birth, growth, glory, degeneration. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first…

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Shea Stadium is not Eden, and the picture of Tom and Nancy Seaver leaving its graceless precincts in tears did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and…

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All over the world thousands upon thousands of men and women pass their whole lives denouncing, instructing, commanding, cajoling, imploring their fellows. With what results? One finds it rather hard…

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The Hemlock Quarterly, an unassuming little newsletter that until recently was the chief perquisite of membership in the Hemlock Society, may have been the only radical publication in the United…

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The notion of the “nostalgic American” served liberals as an ideal whipping boy at a time when the intellectual foundations of liberalism were beginning to erode. As the dogma of…

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Once again, the budgets of the agencies that support the arts are to be cut. Meanwhile, costs in the arts are going up. But one continues to read and hear…

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Among those people in New York who care about newspapers and who like to think of their content as something more than amusement, it has become increasingly difficult to find…

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Atlanta in ruins. Originally published in the October 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine…

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