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

The Algorithmic Sublime

Becoming an Obstructionist

Peter Stamm’s Seven Years

A novel of delusion, obsession, and redemption

Finches I Have Known

Notes from the life of a bird whisperer

Sweet Recovery

How to (re)start a sugar refinery

The Big One

When natural disasters get a boost from humans

Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy

Utterly foreign and completely familiar

Fourples and Fiples and Sixles

Diamond joy

The Power Brokers

How New Orleans came back

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