Last Laugh

A memoir of jokes and jokers

Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades by David Steinberg

The Mothers

“To Licinius” by Horace

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Seeing People History Ignores

Susan Meiselas’s focus on vernacular photographs

The Feminine Critique

Jessica Hopper shines a spotlight on the too-often-overlooked women of rock history

When History Rhymes

The Nikole Hannah-Jones controversy calls to mind an earlier racially motivated effort to stifle free speech at the University of North Carolina

Spoiled

Future Fears

How a 19th-century writer and polymath anticipated the modern world

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

“If China” by Stanislaw Baranczak

Poems read aloud, beautifully

“Bound to Respect”

How Black and white reformers transformed the meaning of the Dred Scott decision’s most infamous line

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

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