Amy Welborn

Up in the Smokies

Caprock

Adventures worth the silence

The Séance and Robert Schumann

How did a long-lost concerto finally come to light?

Beyond Statistics

Ruth Robinson

Reimagining Alabama

Back in the USSR

A glimpse inside the house that Stalin built, and Italy’s anti-fascist First Family

A Poet of Glamour and Chaos

Lady Lazarus rises again

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940­–1956 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby

An excerpt from Candida Moss and Joel Baden’s investigation of the expanding religious and political scope of the popular retail chain

Crushed Cadences and Vented Rests

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

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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