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

The First President To Be Impeached

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

Southern Cassandra

Lillian Smith was a writer and a radical who called out her region’s lies about sex and race

Shrinking Success

Psychopharmacology has not lived up to its early promise

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by 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 America by Greg Grandin

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

Jacques Barzun delivered this lecture half a century ago

How the South Rose Again

Defeated in war, the Confederate states merely changed tactics

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Fantastical Little Dyer

Few artists could match Tintoretto’s mastery of color and form—or his sense of playfulness

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

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

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