The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr

Burned

“The White Heart of God” by Jack Gilbert

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Paige Ledom

Out of the ordinary

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

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

A Lifetime Spent Bearing Witness

The literary giant who rose from the ashes of a people

The Complete Works of Primo Levi Edited by Ann Goldstein

Reimagining Suburbia

What if the world’s greatest architects began looking beyond the city limits?

Hope Is the Enemy

Caring for a patient suffering from dementia means coming to terms with the frustrating paradoxes of memory and language

A Victorian Mystery No More

Cosmic Art

An inquiry into the scientific significance of elegance

A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design By Frank Wilczek

When the Angry Lion Roared

Pierre Boulez and the piece that marked his breakthrough as a composer

Anyone Home?

The centuries-long debate over what resides between our ears

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind By George Makari

To Mars and Beyond

Five questions about the future of space colonization.

Water Everywhere

Latitude for Error

The maps of the 18th century were beautiful works of art, but they sometimes led to disaster

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