Potted History

Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet

Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave By Leonard Todd

Where Does American History Begin?

Mixing geography with invention, the first explorers and mapmakers made the New World a very hard place to pin down

Something Called Terrorism

In a speech given at Harvard 22 years ago
and never before published, Leonard Bernstein
offered a warning that remains timely

Shaking Habit’s House

Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert

How Fiction Works By James Wood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Four Poems

Rattling with Implications

The Most Important Election in History

Is it possible to elect a president without invoking that phrase?

Burma: Captives of the Junta

America’s Dark Page

The New Old Way of Learning Languages

Now all but vanished, a once-popular system of reading Greek and Latin classics could revitalize modern teaching methods

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

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equationby Kenneth Turan

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