The Meaning Behind the Lines

How Ibsen’s toughness and Chekhov’s tenderness transformed American playwriting and acting

Précautions Inutiles

Gary Snyder's Long View

Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore

Reconciling the myth of Ronald Reagan with the reality

Shock Waves

A blast in Baghdad tests the endurance of a soldier and his family

The Devil You Know

Keeping the peace in Ramadi calls for a little moral dexterity

Four Poems

Blue-Collar Brilliance

Questioning assumptions about intelligence, work, and social class

War Stories

Driving to the Moon

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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