Issue

H. T. Webster’s cartoons offer a warm, canny, and utterly accurate view of an era of everyday middle-class life

The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally, he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.

Another frontier closes as the mapping of America approaches completion.

For more than a century now, American homeowners have been struggling to remake their small patch of the environment into a soft, green carpet just like the neighbor’s. Who told us this was the way a lawn had to be?

The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.

A controversial recent book suggests that what we think of as good manners is a relatively new thing, a commodity manufactured to meet the needs of an industrial age. But, now that the Industrial Revolution is over, we may need them more than ever, for very different reasons.