To: The National Passport Processing Center, Philadelphia

Re: The photo in question

Magic Fingers

Do baby sign language courses really work?

Visit to a Small, Cold Planet

Ancient Romans named Mercury for their messenger of the gods

The Search for Wonder

A lasting lesson on how to view the world

Downton’s End

Another reason that we love the English aristocracy

Over the Bar in the River

The final words of a dear, dear friend

Time Traveling Through a Sentence

To understand language we relive the past and predict the future

Ode to (Silent) Spring

Rachel Carson, who died 49 years ago this month, made a difference

Teachers of the World, Unite!

How Marx and Engels can bring a class to life

How’s That Again?

How meaning goes missing

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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