Magic Fingers

Do baby sign language courses really work?

The Lack of Facilities

Studies in India find impediments to progress that may surprise you

Let’s Write a Sestina

First, Please Yourself

Eating the Avalanche

Notes on two insatiable appetites

What Makes Hemingway Hemingway?

On the psychology of artistic style

Remembering Robert Stone

The novelist possessed his characters, and was possessed by them

In Flanders Fields …

The wild poppies are vanishing

Ten Neglected Classics

Airport Buoyancy

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

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

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