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

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 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

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 Crowby Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Fantastical Little Dyer

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

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