Not all thinking happens in conversation. For some introverts, writing is where thought begins—slowly, privately, and with surprising depth.

Thomas Jefferson was tasked with drafting a wartime document declaring independence. How did it become one of history’s most enduring symbols?

I can’t think of a more fitting celebration of this Fourth of July than a reading of Walter Isaacson’s thin volume “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” Isaacson is an influential public scholar and ...