Notes from the Earth

Running Yangtze rapids, following Afghan herdsmen, four-wheeling Australia’s Jack Hills—intimate contacts with natural landscapes

Labor

Art in the Time of War

A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II By Ilaria Dagnini Brey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Mindful Beauty

What poetry and applied mathematics have in common

The Common Good

The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools By E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

Film Release

A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits By Linda Gordon

Mother Country

A daughter examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune

Relativity and All That

Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation

Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Watchers of the Skies

Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes

Something New in the West

Kurt Beals on translating All Quiet on the Western Front

The Resistance Fighter as Philosopher

Remembering Vladimir Jankélévitch

Winter Sun

“The Vow” by Yuliya Musakovska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Lindsey Weber

Relationships that define us

“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”

Five new prompts

In the Endless Arctic Light

A journey to the far north of Norway means confronting our changing climate

The Bears

“Faustina, or, Rock Roses” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Family/History

David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story

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