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

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

A Story for Christmas

Labor

Art in the Time of War

A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II By Ilaria Dagnini Brey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Mindful Beauty

What poetry and applied mathematics have in common

The Common Good

The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools By E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

Film Release

A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits By Linda Gordon

Mother Country

A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune

Relativity and All That

Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation

Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Watchers of the Skies

Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes

Homecomings

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