Features

April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik. HarperCollins, 496 pages, $32.50 In January 1913, the 50th anniversary of the EmancipationProclamation, Dudley Miles, a professor at Columbia University, published anessay titled “The Civil War as Unifier.” The “true significance” of the war, Mileswrote, was how quickly sectional reconciliation had been achieved. Unlike civilwars and […]

We were standing in our neighbors’ house–I must have been five or six–next to a diaper-changing table, where the moms were cooing over a new baby. Suddenly I was dizzyingly puzzled by how adults knew whether that blurry lump of flesh was a girl or a boy. My mother was quite impatient with the question, […]

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is neither the worst nor the best movie he has ever made, but it is certainly the strangest. Our initial tendency is to attribute this to the involvement of Stanley Kubrick, who collaborated with Spielberg on the project for many years (though when he was given complete control after Kubrick’s death, Spielberg […]