The Great Detached

As a journalist, Tom Wolfe’s greatest asset was his emotional distance from his subjects

Make Them Work

A different sort of moral obligation

We Want a Hero

Carole D’Inverno

Breaking Mountains

Do or Make

Stitching History

What an old quilt can teach us about antebellum America

The Conquered Ear

Roger Sessions’s Eighth Symphony, 50 years after its premiere

Kanye and Ta-Nehisi

“This is my life, homie, you decide yours”

Pierre Loves Natasha

Peter Fiore

Lost in the Woods

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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