Top of the Stack
What Might Have Been
Bobby Jones and the Fight for Racial Justice in Golf
The Front Page
Seeing Catch-22 Twice
“People speak too narrowly when they talk of Catch-22 as a satire of humanity. It’s that, yes, and there are few better. But it’s really a vicious satiric attack on God, as much as his poorly made creatures.”
The Last of the Iron-Assed Loners
“I have been asked,” he announced in a vigorous bass voice, “what it’s like to be a personage of the cinema.” He gave his audience a slow ironic glare. “It’s like being trampled to death by geese.”
Scroll Man
When Washington lawyer Hershel Shanks changed careers and got interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, he turned an arcane academic debate into an intercontinental spectator sport. Biblical archaeology would never be the same.
Fear of Reading: Lexical Anhedonia Sweeps the Land
What to do when you have the inability to feel pleasure while reading.
The Strange Death of Danny Casolaro
Was the reporter who claimed to have found the missing link between Iran-contra, the October Surprise, and B.C.C.I. a victim of a conspiracy—or of conspiracy theories?
The Day the Soul Train Crashed
In the ’70s, Gamble and Huff built an empire in Philadelphia by making records that appealed to both Black and White audiences. By the early ’80s, their multimillion-dollar kingdom crumbled and everyone stood to lose.
Stone Free
“So much of making it is just having the guts to stand there till it happens. It’s a contest of wills. Because it’s not like anybody’s going, ‘Oh, I hope everything fabulous happens for you.’”
New American Pilgrim
Sarah Vowell found her calling in rejuvenating the quaint field of heritage tourism. Her trip to discover where Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were shot, buried, and memorialized is a search for the meaning of America.
War of Remembrance
How the problems of one Philadelphia family created the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and triggered the most controversial debate in modern mental health.
Rex Reed Doesn’t Speak to Anyone
Pauline Kael Doesn’t Talk to John Simon. John Simon Doesn’t Talk to Judith Crist. Judith Crist Doesn’t Speak to Rex Reed … When Movie Critics Mattered.
The Ghosts of Ole Miss
On a gray winter’s day, the atmosphere electric for a game, one perceives how Ole Miss sports is the buttress to the local emotions. All universities should be in small towns.
Bruce Springsteen and the Secret World
“There’s not much people can count on today. People have been shown such disrespect. You want to show people that somehow, that somewhere, somebody can…I guess you just don’t want to let them down.”