Christmas Day

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

Books for the Holidays

Gift ideas for the young and old

Why We Know So Little About High Achievers

Inquiring minds want to know—just not scientists

Galileo’s Spyglass

The telescope resulted from his improvements to a mere curiosity

Christie and Obama’s Romantic Plot

The appeal of enemies who become friends

Do Not Kill

The first report in our new Afghanistan series, “Snapshots of a Fading War”

Start a Blog

What does it mean to be a public intellectual?

Christmas Reading

A lot more than Dickens can help invoke the Yuletide spirit

What Toddlers Know They Don’t Know About Plurals

Fifty years later, the Wug Test is still teaching us how children learn new word forms

Science v. Poetry

Worlds apart, and yet alike in many ways

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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