The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces – bells, time balls, and clock faces – that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares bene...

from "Mount Fuji" A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he'd begun to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have "penetrated to their essential nature". And more, by 100...

For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court. As in prior editions, McCloskey's orig...

"On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life" presents Heinrich Meier's confrontation with Rousseau's Reveries, the philosopher's most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study...

What's the most important garment in a woman's closet? More often than not, the answer is "the little black dress". For decades, fashion magazines have touted the LBD as the perfect solution to almost every fashion crisis. Dressed up or down, with fl...

In April 1644, two nuns fled Bologna's convent for reformed prostitutes. A perfunctory archiepiscopal investigation went nowhere, and the nuns were quickly forgotten. By June of the next year, however, an overwhelming stench drew a woman to the wine...

In 2010, Philip Marsden, whom Giles Foden has called "one of our most thoughtful travel writers", moved with his family to a rundown farmhouse in the countryside in Cornwall. From the moment he arrived, Marsden found himself fascinated by the landsca...

We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers – and the merely curious – to see. In "Windows into the Soul", Gary T. Marx, a central figure in t...

In the popular imagination, Islam is often associated with words like oppression, totalitarianism, intolerance, cruelty, misogyny, and homophobia, while its presumed antonyms are Christianity, the West, liberalism, individualism, freedom, citizenship...

Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a s...