The Censor in the Mirror

It’s not only what the Chinese Propaganda Department does to artists, but what it makes artists do to their own work

The Torture Colony

In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds

Potted History

Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet

Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave By Leonard Todd

Where Does American History Begin?

Mixing geography with invention, the first explorers and mapmakers made the New World a very hard place to pin down

Something Called Terrorism

In a speech given at Harvard 22 years ago
and never before published, Leonard Bernstein
offered a warning that remains timely

Shaking Habit’s House

Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert

How Fiction Works By James Wood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rattling with Implications

The Most Important Election in History

Is it possible to elect a president without invoking that phrase?

Autumn 2008

Burma: Captives of the Junta

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

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

A Story for Christmas

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