A Cocktail Conundrum

Our Red Giant

How to Pay for What We Need

Congress could create money, as it did during the Civil War, funding public projects that shock the economy back to life

Big Thinker

The diplomat who argued for “containment”—and lived to regret it

George F. Kennan: An American Life By John Lewis Gaddis

The Nature of Things

An ancient poem’s appeal

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt

The Gravity of Falling

Having hurtled through the American century, we are distracted and confused. But can we find our way again?

Irregular Guy

The sage of Baker Street

On Conan Doyle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling By Michael Dirda

Memento Mori

A mother’s grief

Blue Nights By Joan Didion

Stuttgart: Continental Drifter

A Jew in the Northwest

Exile, ethnicity, and the search for the perfect futon

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

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

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