Crystal Blue Persuader

Tommy James of the Shondells goes on record

Craft

It’s all in the hands

Oracle in Pearls

Ada Louise Huxtable, able to depict a building in a few memorable words, set the standard for informed and fearless criticism

Endless Rewriting

When a novice writer received a letter from Jacques Barzun, asking her to write a book, how could she have known what she was in for?

Wing Men

Lepidopterists on the loose

Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World By William Leach

The Allure of the Counterintuitive

It’s not enough for social science to inform: it must surprise

A Great Event

From the Sun to the supper table

A Workout for the Mind

The gym isn’t just for sweating anymore

Old Ink

From our continuing Afghanistan series, “Snapshots of a Fading War”

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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