Remembering Pianist William Kapell

Our Founding Contradiction

The entrenched dichotomy at the center of the national story

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson

Head of the State

How the FBI’s founding director ruled from the shadows

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Structural Foundations

The buildings that defined the Western world

The Story of Architecture by Witold Rybczynski

Quark of Habit

Scientists keep pushing for larger particle colliders—but is this really wise?

The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World by Suzie Sheehy

Beauty Born of Ashes

The story of a lyrical masterpiece that almost wasn’t

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis

The Naked Flame

Winter 2023

Five Poems

Three Stories

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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