Richard E. Maltby Jr. on his fifty years of writing puzzles for Harper’s Magazine, his side hustle as a musical lyricist and Tony Award–winning director, and the crossword’s place in contemporary Amer ...

is a writer and bell ringer who lives in England.

From an archived version of a blog post titled “How to Murder Your Husband,” which was allegedly written in 2011 by Nancy Brophy, who was put on trial in April for shooting and killing her husband in ...

In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine, a selection from Jeff Kisseloff’s book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, which was published in April by ...

The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps. That I woke at all & ...

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t ...

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 progress became ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Five days before the U.S. military launched a series of air strikes on northern Venezuela and a Special Forces unit armed with blowtorches broke into a Venezuelan military compound to kidnap that ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. In the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New England found itself beset by ...