Bringing In the Horse

Virgil’s account of the sacking of Troy has similarities to the political situation of our day

When the Well Runs Dry

Searching for clean water in California

Stress Test for Free Speech

Social media are destroying the democratic culture that the First Amendment is meant to protect

A Stinging Decline

Four questions about the future of bees

The Loyal Opposition

A timely new biography of an avatar of courage and bipartisanship

The Improbable Wendell Willkie by David Levering Lewis

A Poet in Purgatory

An inside look at a literary marriage that ended in disaster

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956–1963 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Neighborhood Watch

Using Big Data to get out of the bubble

Finding Time

Geochronologists establish precise dates for events that occurred eons ago

Citizenship Prep

Expanding refugee access to online resources

Dangerous Ground

When confronting matters of race, some boundaries are more easily breached than others

The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Burned

“The White Heart of God” by Jack Gilbert

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Paige Ledom

Out of the ordinary

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

Cudillero

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

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