SPOTLIGHT

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

By Stephanie Bastek Friday, January 17, 2025

SPOTLIGHT

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

By Stephanie Bastek Friday, January 17, 2025

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Selective Lip Service

Attending an elite college is not an entitlement

Blue and white striped umbrellas at a beach
Editors’ Picks

Here Comes the Sun

What to read when it arrives

Person walking down stairs, black and white photo

Nine-Line Stanzas

Women in profile reading on the beach
Web Essays

The Great Summer Read

Why do we persist in this often futile literary quest?

Portrait of the Artist

Alexis Granwell

Sculpting Paintings

Illustration of a vintage blue car against a yellow background
Smarty Pants Podcast

Stick Shifts and Safety Belts

How car culture swallowed America

Asturias Days

A Breath of Air

Read Me a Poem

An Excerpt from William Wordsworth’s Prelude

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Pink daisies facing the sunset
Poetry

June: A Sonnet

Next Line, Please

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Asturias Days

Casa Gorín

Read Me a Poem

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Book Reviews

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

Article

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Asturias Days

Birthday Boy

Read Me a Poem

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

Article

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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Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)
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Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

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