The Rock

“The Canonization” by John Donne

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Our Post-Privacy World

Total information awareness may make us feel safe, but will we regret living in a surveillance state?

The After Time

The future of civilization after Covid-19

Coronavirus in the Shadow of the Holocaust

When we look at the pandemic raging around us, do we really know what it is we’re witnessing?

Jeremy Irons Reads T. S. Eliot

The legendary actor on why poetry matters

Tolerance in a Dark Place

An excerpt from Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey Through the AIDS Crisis by Ross A. Slotten

Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey Through the AIDS Crisis Ross A. Slotten

Whose World?

“Let Me Begin Again” by Philip Levine

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Swift Completion

Why letters matter

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 Unionby Richard Carwardine

Cudillero

“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

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

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