Peter McGuire’s Holiday

This Column Needs Edited

Jacob and Esau

No Degrees of Separation

Getting Better All the Time

Although you wouldn’t know it by watching the local news, humankind is becoming ever more civilized

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined By Steven Pinker

Dubya and Me

Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush

A Chesterton With No Flab

A new anthology often obscures the writer’s best work

The Everyman Chesterton By G. K. Chesterton

LBJ’s Wild Ride

Hanging on for dear life during the 1960 campaign

Secret Sharers

In an age of leaks, forgeries, and Internet hoaxes, archivists must guard our information while keeping hackers at bay

Leningraders, summer 1942

The Worst of Times

A Soviet city barely survives

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944 By Anna Reid

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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