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 Christophe by 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

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

Indefensible Torture, Unfree Speech

What Censorship Kept America from Learning about the Futility of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”

The Black Banners Declassified: How Torture Derailed the War on Terror after 9/11 by Ali Soufan with Daniel Freedman

Berlin Bops

How East German punks tore down the wall that divided them

Filling in the Blanks

An excerpt from How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption About Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong by Douglas B. Downey

How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption About Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong by Douglas B. Downey

Covid Fatigue on the Continent

In Europe, pandemic restrictions are returning after a summer of eating, drinking, and vacationing

Pasamontañas

“Neutral Tones” by Thomas Hardy

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Smoke Out

Lighting up as the world is burning down

Coronavirus and the Coming Election

No matter who wins, the pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon

Morbid and Misunderstood

The science and history of books bound in human skin

Art After the Plague

How painters through the ages have responded to contagion, pestilence, and deadly epidemics

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