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

From Romania With Love

Dancing with Dinicu

Hip-hop in the Alps

A transcendent mountaintop moment

A Hole in One

December: A Sonnet

Paying to Be Locked Up

Private prison companies treat immigrant detainees like convicted criminals—and reap huge profits from the people they hold

New Zealand: Beauty and the Beef

Will the nation’s identity continue to be pastoral, or will its urbanites create a hip young image of environmental awareness?

The Delta Blues

A photographer documents former boomtowns in the South

A Pleasure to Read You

Shouldn’t literature enchant, surprise, and teach us? And to make this happen, shouldn’t we be the most expert readers we can be?

Black Lives and the Boston Massacre

John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve always understood it, the ultimate
expression of principle and the rule of law

Of Faith and Tragedy

A scholar of early Christianity on how her work informed her life

Why Religion?by Elaine Pagels

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