“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Hasani Sahlehe

Sunshine and Rainbows

Skin Deep, Only Deeper

How people have used makeup to define—and defy—their roles in society

Last Laugh

A memoir of jokes and jokers

Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades by David Steinberg

The Mothers

“To Licinius” by Horace

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Seeing People History Ignores

Susan Meiselas’s focus on vernacular photographs

When History Rhymes

The Nikole Hannah-Jones controversy calls to mind an earlier racially motivated effort to stifle free speech at the University of North Carolina

Spoiled

Future Fears

How a 19th-century writer and polymath anticipated the modern world

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

“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

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

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