From Mandate to Nation State

How a failed Arab rebellion ensured Israel’s survival

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict by Oren Kessler

Chaucer’s Leading Lady

Marion Turner on our enduring fascination with the Wife of Bath

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Doors of Perception

The often unreliable ways we interpret reality

Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward

Milking the G.O.A.T.

Why are we so obsessed with anointing the very best?

Mortal Music

Franz Schubert, silence, and the final reckoning

Culture Shock

The hidden history of reverse colonization

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Life at the Bottom

It’s not just the rich who victimize the poor

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

The Center Cannot Hold

A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

Drunk on Dub

The new Caribbean sounds of Ishion Hutchinson

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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