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

Casa Gorín

What We Got Wrong

How Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions

Point and Shoot

How the Abu Ghraib images redefine photography

The Coming of the French

My life as an English professor

The Software Wars

Why you can’t understand your computer

"I Can’t Believe I’m Doing It with Madame Bovary"

Learning to write musical comedy

In Praise of Flubs

The pursuit of perfection has taken all the personality out of recorded classical music

The Peculiar Intellectual

In the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South By Michael O’Brien

What Einstein Knew

One year and five papers that changed physics forever

Einstein 1905: The Standard of GreatnessBy John S. Rigden /The Einstein Almanac By Alice Calaprice

The Crooner and the Physicist

Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass

One Bad Husband

What the “Bluebeard” story tells us about marriage

Secrets Behind the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives By Maria Tatar

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