Be Open to Surprise

Old Shirts

Here’s to a long and lasting relationship

Headless Bear Walks Up to Woman; Awesomeness Ensues

The search for the perfect title

Genesis of Planets

A new image may revolutionize theories about their formation

Of Ciphers—In the Brain

Show, Don’t Tell

My Wedding Day

The priest’s last words to a nervous groom

When Nouns Verb Oddly

Verb meanings are slipperier than noun meanings

Kidneys for Sale

No simple answers to questions about exploitation and expediency

Finish What Dickinson Started

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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