Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by 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

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

Aping Us

Beasts behaving badly

The Moral Lives of Animals By Dale Peterson

How Longfellow Woke the Dead

When first published 150 years ago, his famous poem about Paul Revere was read as a bold statement of his opposition to slavery

Interview with a Neandertal

What I always wanted to ask our distant cousins about love and death and sorrow and dinner

Patriot Games

Hollywood’s Red Scare

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War By J. Hoberman

‘I Tried to Stop the Bloody Thing’

In World War I, nearly as many British men refused the draft—20,000—as were killed on the Somme’s first day. Why were those who fought for peace forgotten?

Harlem Notes

A writer goes uptown

Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Street Scenes

Patience

Bard Justice

Shakespeare and the law

A Thousand Times More Fair What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice By Kenji Yoshino

The View from 90

Even when those in my generation have reached a state of serenity, wisdom, and relative comfort, what we face can hardly be called the golden years

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