Take wisdom where you can find it, and keep on looking—especially in unlikely places. The first three or four sentences of this illustrated compendium of more than eighty of wisdom’s greatest hits points directly at a religious... Read More

The premise here is simple, yet its importance is impossible to overstate—men gazing at women creates a toxic environment, and male photographers have always posed their female subjects to please men, perpetuating a narrow expression... Read More

The human body has nearly 700 named skeletal muscles, so it stands to reason that an ideal exercise would make use of every last one—a tall order, to be sure. The full-body-workout gold medal for sporting events may go to the swimming,... Read More

A great memoir offers the-rest-of-the-story appeal, and when the CIA, 9/11, waterboarding, whistleblowing, scapegoating, coverups, and federal prison all factor in, the page turning reaches hyperdrive. John Kiriakou spent fifteen years... Read More

In the first few years of the sixteenth century, in Orvieto’s splendid medieval cathedral, Luca Signorelli painted The Last Judgment, a sprawling, shocking fresco of muscled nude men, bared buttocks, horrific violence, antichrists,... Read More

In her consistent ability to write a perfect line of poetry—and the river rose thirty-three feet above the highway and took what it wanted, and it wanted nearly everything, and left just the sidewalks—Gillian Wegener upsets the idea... Read More

Tension. Simmering. —Beneath her matter-of-fact, easy-going, sit-yourself-down, let-me-tell-it-like-it-is chatifying. And her power we take deadly seriously. Camille T. Dungy is a Fort Collins, Colorado, essayist and author of three... Read More

Stand your ground and make thoughtful observations—carefully, and with aplomb. Ben Berman repeatedly delivers on this not-so-easy dictum. He ain’t no bum. A fan of Dante’s terza rima rhyme schemes, Berman’s early book, Strange... Read More