Fifty years ago, Motown Records crossed racial lines and helped define an era. We listen back to the music and those who made it.

From “The Andromeda Strain” to”Jurassic Park,” “ER,” and “State of Fear,” we look at the blockbuster master’s long reach.

We’ll ask The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann, and Daily Beast chief Tina Brown.

Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan takes the long view of this American moment, with a call for unity and what she calls “Patriotic Grace.”

Remembering Paul Newman. Actor and activist. Butch Cassidy. Cool Hand Luke. We look back on an American movie hero.

The wisdom of the world and ages, in a new collection of proverbs from Zanzibar, from ancient days, and from the corner store.

In storybook America, when folks sit down at the barbeque, at the bar, at the town bowling alley, at the local cafe, they come in all political and cultural stripes.
Conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, independents — all rubbing elbows, pitching in their two cents, hashing out the way of a great democracy.
In real America today, says [...]

America is in the middle of a tattoo craze. Forty percent of Americans aged 26 to 40 have been tattooed. More than a third of Americans 18 to 25 have already been inked somewhere — sometimes in ways shocking to their elders.
But the U.S. tattoo culture is nothing compared to some of the world’s body [...]

Of the world’s seven thousand languages nearly half will disappear by the end of this century. Their extinction means the end of entire cultures, traditions, and histories.
K. Davis Harrison and Gregory Anderson are on a mission to save these dying languages. They’re linguists, but not the kind who spend their lives in libraries and classrooms.
They [...]

In the 1990s, when China’s fabled Shaolin Temple was celebrating its 1500th anniversary as a center of Zen Buddhism and kung fu, American college student Matthew Polly was on a pilgrimage of his own.
The skinny kid from Topeka, Kansas who had grown up on Star Wars and David Carradine was leaving Princeton University to look [...]

Americans’ impressions of the Amish tend to run hard and fast to stereotypes: wholesome horse-and-buggy barn-raisers or holier-than-thou cult of the past that cheats with chainsaws when you’re not looking.
The beards and bonnets and old-fashioned ways are endlessly alluring, and confusing. Is this the simple life that would save the planet if we all suited [...]

Heather Byer was eight years into a New York career — lugging her brief case, hitting her marks, doing the lunches, calming her boss — and hating it. It wasn’t rich enough, deep enough, real enough to be her life. Not nearly.
Then one day, Heather Byer — thirty-something, career woman, five-one, a hundred and two [...]

American founding father Thomas Jefferson knew a lot about music, architecture, revolution, slaves, philosophy, governing, and wine.
Jefferson was far and away the young nation’s wine-lover-in-chief. He advised sober George Washington on what to drink, kept fabulous wine cellars when the country was still the province of hard cider and whiskey; braved pirates and hurricanes to [...]