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

The Summit Revealed

Alan Hovhaness and his Mysterious Mountain

No Place Like …

Finding happiness in small spaces

The Ultimate Cost of Our Endless Wars

Could the debt alone deal a fatal blow to our democracy?

The Trope of a Nation

Carrie Johnson

Fragmented Landscapes

The First President To Be Impeached

Andrew Johnson beat the charges against him by a single vote, but what did the nation lose?

Shrinking Success

Psychopharmacology has not lived up to its early promise

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illnessby Anne Harrington

Continental Drift

Westward expansion delayed a needed national reckoning

The End of The Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of Americaby Greg Grandin

Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969)

Jacques Barzun delivered this lecture half a century ago

The Lost Lakes of Iran

A drought takes its toll

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