Is There a Word for That?

We have long invented language to fill gaps in our vocabulary, but not all coinages are created equal

Sea Hunt, Microscopic Version

On the Brink

How safe are our nukes?

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety By Eric Schlosser

Whither Digital Natives?

Lost and Found

An ancestral home holds the relics of a family’s past—and the promise of its future

Lives of the Ancients

Animating the Greeks and Romans

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations By Mary Beard

Space-Time-Quilt Continuum

What We Chase

A writer mourns colleagues lost in May’s killer storms but knows she’ll pursue tornadoes once again

Two of a Kind

A postwar friendship

Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize By Sean B. Carroll

Istanbul: Hot Days in the Park

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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