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

“The Yellow Star That Goes With Me” by Jessica Greenbaum

Poems read aloud, beautifully

A Midcentury Bender

Revisiting Mad Men, 15 years later

Ordinary Madness

Kate Summerscale on the fixations and fears that make us human

The Vocabulary Problem

“Unending Love” by Rabindranath Tagore

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Jackie Milad

Our Historied Selves

Know Your Earworm

Susan Rogers on figuring out why you love your favorite songs

Bad Jew

Reckoning with a heritage as painfully distant as it is impossible to lose

The Stalker

Averted Vision

Seeing the world anew in the aftermath of family tragedy, through the lenses of physics and theology

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