Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

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 Christophe by 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

When Ideas Mattered

How “freedom from” became “freedom to”

THE FREE WORLD: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

Jenny Freestone

Transforming the material and the natural

Blind Accidents

How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film

Seconds from Midnight

Busting the myth that skilled diplomacy saved the world

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisisby Serhii Plokhy

Caracara, Caw Caw

Meet the smartest bird you’ve never heard of

Poetry in the Abstract

What happens when scientists write haiku?

La Buena Vida

“Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Swimming the River of Song

How a young scholar demystified the ancient oral tradition

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parryby Robert Kanigel

Surviving the Anthropocene

Can we reverse-engineer our way out of catastrophe?

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

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