Ancient DNA Tells a New Human Story

From Leisure & Arts

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  An Eastern Mystic

  The epic ‘Changing Light at Sandover’ was inspired by a first-century Greek Jew whom James Merrill contacted through a Ouija board.

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  The Western Prophets

  Edward Abbey was ‘the least pious of environmentalists,’ fond of guns and tossing his beer cans by the side of the road—yet his rage inspired eco-terrorism. Wallace Stegner’s words helped frame the 1964 Wilderness Act and gave a Westerner’s view on the national soul.

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  A Towering Midwesterner

  Slipping in and out of consciousness as he neared death, Saul Bellow opened his eyes and asked aloud: ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?’

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  Kate Atkinson’s New Novel Celebrates the Greatest Generation

  A novel unorthodox in structure but extremely traditional in its admiration for the ‘greatest generation.’

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  A Patchwork Occupation

  With the Northern public eager to ‘bring the boys home,’ the federal forces occupying the South were reduced from 200,000 in 1865 to a mere 28,000 at the end of 1866.

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  Distaff Scientists

  Is it wrong to be captivated by a great thinker’s personality, rather than the drier stuff of résumés?

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  Science Fiction: The War Between the Social Networks

  Who needs a state, once we have perfectly sorted social networks?

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  The Half-Life of Physicists

  In 1947 Erwin Schrödinger boasted of a big new result that would beat his sometime collaborator Albert Einstein. They were both wrong.

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  Oliver Sacks, Power-Lifter

  As a motorcycle-loving young doctor, Oliver Sacks descended into loneliness and drug addiction. The wild energies were tamed by swimming and book-writing.

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  Orson Welles: A Genius With a Grasshopper Mind

  Orson Welles struggled to make a film about a filmmaker who is struggling to make a film.

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  Raising the Baa

  Wordsworth and Coleridge have nothing on the native son of the Lake District who tends sheep and also writes like a dream.

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  Five Best: Sally McMillen

  The author of ‘Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life’ recommends biographies of notable first ladies.

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  Why Do So Many Kids’ Books Have Such Poor Grammar?

  The grammar in too many children’s books is surprisingly careless.

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  A Sordid Tale of Birds, Bees and Bureaucracies

  Fascist Italy believed sex education ‘sapped the virility’ of the nation. Postwar Sweden encouraged it to limit the size of families.

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  Delving Into the World of China’s Blind Masseurs

  In a country with more than 17 million people who are visually impaired, there are but a few dozen schools for the blind. Forced to work for a living in the absence of an adequate welfare system, they must therefore seek out the few career options available to them. One of these is work as a masseur.

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  Is Private Thought Possible in the iPhone Age?

  Text messages, pop-ups, robocalls—there is no shortage of claims on our attention. How can we reclaim our interior lives?

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  The United States of Secrets

  The U.S. government is the most open in the history of the world—but it still keeps far too many things secret.

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  The Definitive History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

  By 1934, with all of the Nazis’ enemies defeated or intimidated, concentration had lost its original purpose. But Himmler was ready with a new rationale: The camps could serve as a tool to improve the German race.

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  The Man Who Wrote New York City

  After three decades of brilliant stories, Joseph Mitchell worked for 30 more years without publishing a word.

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  America’s Concentration Camps

  About 70% of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans held were citizens. Some 2,300 would fight for their country.

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  What Does a President Owe to God?

  These days a president’s true beliefs and convictions are obscured by anodyne, ecumenical rhetoric.

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  Nuclear Neighbors’ Tug of War

  For Mohammed Ali Jinnah. partition was a triumph. For his longtime rival, Gandhi, it was a ‘spiritual tragedy.’

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  Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Latest ‘Struggle’

  The narrator admires the way that rock musicians live on the edge; it’s the way he wants to live too.

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  The Best New Children’s Books

  Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Joohee Yoon’s “Beastly Verse”; Kenneth Kraegel’s “The Song of Delphine”; Eve Bunting’s “Yard Sale” and Bimba Landmann’s “Just for Today.”

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  Larry Kramer: Still Acting Up

  Readers ‘are just going to have to get used to the frank language of bodily functions,’ Kramer warns.

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  Mark Rothko’s Jewish Paintings

  ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ the painter said.

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  The Soul (Music) of the South

  Musicians, black or white, needed to be versatile. Getting a gig often trumped personal attitudes.

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  Owl Love Is Here to Stay

  Holding a great gray owl is ‘similar to holding a big down pillow with a fresh sweet potato in the middle.’

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  Five Best: Jonathan Schneer

  The author of “Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet” recommends books about the men who helped win World War II.