Growing Up in a Troubled Neighborhood

Kai Bird’s Middle East Memories and Meditations

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis By Kai Bird

Afghanistan: ‘So This Is Paktya’

How ready are our allies to secure their own country?

An Assassin’s Tale

In the footsteps of the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr.

Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin By Hampton Sides

Do Head Meds Make Us Sicker?

The argument that says they do has problems of its own

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America By Robert Whitaker

Spaced Out in the City

Profit

Mayhem Across the Border

A Mexican city where homicide is the new normal

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields By Charles Bowden

Lost Classics

An address delivered in 2009 to graduates in classics at UC Berkeley

A Joyless Noise

Two pleas for making life a whole lot quieter

The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About NoiseBy Garret Keizer / Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence By George Michelsen

At Ease in the Stone Age

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

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

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