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?

A Story for Christmas

Life Is Short

“The Yellow Star That Goes With Me” by Jessica Greenbaum

Poems read aloud, beautifully

A Midcentury Bender

Revisiting Mad Men, 15 years later

Ordinary Madness

Kate Summerscale on the fixations and fears that make us human

The Degradation Drug

A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior

The Vocabulary Problem

“Unending Love” by Rabindranath Tagore

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Know Your Earworm

Susan Rogers on figuring out why you love your favorite songs

Bad Jew

Reckoning with a heritage as painfully distant as it is impossible to lose

The Stalker

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