Above and Beyond

Doomed to Re-Tweet It

Hearts With One Purpose

A revealing group portrait of Ireland’s motley crew of rebels

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 By R. F. Foster

A Terrible Loss

Lincoln’s assassination 150 years ago turned plans for postwar reconciliation to a frenzy of violence

A Taste for Higher Math

The numbers that count

How to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics By Eugenia Cheng

Whither American Culture?

Kill the Creature

In search of snakes—and the balm of charity and love in a world of infinitely lonely space

Cooking Up Trouble in the Heartland

Great Escape

On Normandy’s coast a century ago, Claude Debussy fled the war and composed his final piano masterpiece

Two Dutch Visionaries

How the optical revolution revealed worlds large and small

Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing By Laura J. Snyder

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

“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

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