Mencken Day

Solitude sustains only for so long

Babies Bamboozled by Numbers

What’s so hard about four?

Venus

As our twin turns

Not Einstein

Teaching science to the rest of us

Inch by Inch

What makes America great

Then and Now

Going home again

On the Psychology of Swearing

Could cursing be good for us?

Here, Kitty Kitty

For I will consider my cats Frisky, Buster, Snuffy, etc.

Reading Caliban

Why can’t scholars write more clearly?

The Clintons Up Close

A friendship between two couples yields insights into a presidency and a marriage

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

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

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