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

Breezing Up a Fair Wind

Summer 2015

Poems and Secret Messages

Coming Up Trumps

A conversation about words

Pungent Metaphors

The Examined Lie

A meditation on memory

Talk of the Town

At the Concord Lyceum, Emerson tried out his lectures on his neighbors

It Takes a Laboratory

Science is no longer the domain of solitary experimenters

Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex By Michael Hiltzik

The Case of the Widening Gap

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