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Writers

New Research

This Headline Is Trying to Manipulate You, And It’s Working

Bad headlines stick with you, even if you read the story

A new Archives of American Art exhibition, "A Day in the Life," looks inside 35 diaries of American artists.

Peering into the Secret Diaries of American Artists

A new Archives of American Art exhibition looks at how artists documented their lives before social media

A Persian calligraphy that developed in 14th-century Iran, nasta'liq, is the focus of a new exhibition at the Sackler Gallery. The script in this work dates to the early 1600s.

Long Before Emojis, the Picassos of Persian Calligraphy Brought Emotion to Writing

The world’s first exhibition devoted to nasta’liq, a Persian calligraphy, is now on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The initiation ceremony for a 19th century secret society, as imagined by an artist.

The Cannibal Club: Racism and Rabble-Rousing in Victorian England

These 19th-century gentlemen of good standing let their inner boors loose in secret London backrooms

Cool Finds

See Samuel Beckett’s Doodles of James Joyce And Charlie Chaplin

The six-notebook handwritten manuscript has been in private hands since the 1960s

Monument to Cervantes in Madrid

Cool Finds

Spain Begins to Search for Cervantes’ Bones

Experts use ground-penetrating radar to search for the author’s bones

Charles Dodgson

Cool Finds

Lewis Carroll Hated Fame So Much He Almost Wished He’d Never Written His Books

At least, that’s what he said in a letter, now in the University of Southern California library

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Trending Today

How Gabriel Garcia Marquez Became a Writer

Marquez attributed his writing to drawing as a child…and Franz Kafka

Hustle through America’s Huckster History with a Smithsonian Curator as Your Guide

A blow by blow of the flimflams and tales of hustlers throughout history, art and literature

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Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, now Drean, a town near Algeria's northeast coast.

Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?

On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist, our reporter searches the north African nation for signs of his legacy

Constitution of the United States

Should the Constitution Be Scrapped?

In a new book, Louis Michael Seidman claims that arguing about the constitutionality of laws and reforms is the cause of our harsh political discourse

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How to Tour Jane Austen’s English Countryside

Follow in the footsteps of Mr. Darcy and the Bennet sisters and take in the manors and gardens of rural England

It was at the La Comédie-Française where Hugo brought his controversial new play, “Hernani,” that became a spark plug for Paris’s greater societal and political tensions

Take a Tour of Victor Hugo’s Paris

As a film version of his Les Miserables hits theaters, consider traveling in the French writer’s footsteps

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Lewis Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper's, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age.

Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeed

With his erudite Quarterly, the legendary Harper’s editor aims for an antidote to digital-age ignorance

Henry Wiencek, far left, (clockwise from upper right) Ken Jennings, Michael Dobbs, Abigail Tucker and David Wise all contributed to the October issue of Smithsonian.

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