Lingua Americana

A conversation about words

Abolition Gone Wrong

Despite good intentions, some opponents of the Atlantic slave trade caused more harm

Ship of DeathBy Billy G. Smith / The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World By Greg Grandin

The Novels Don’t Change, But We Do
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Rereading those works that matter to us proves that books read us even as we read them

Eric Rohmer and Me

What a classic film from the French new wave taught me about the illusions of my youth

Night Train to Gijón

The fried-pepper sandwiches were oily and delicious, and the Spanish lesson was even more memorable

Incident at Mittersill

A new opera explores the mysterious death of the composer Anton Webern

Humility

Ministry of Talent

JFK’s thousand days of crisis

Camelot’s Court By Robert Dallek

The Disappearing Accent

For a while, youngsters stop noticing differences between dialects

More Game, Less Pain

Video gamers tend to become desensitized

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

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

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