SPOTLIGHT

Double Exposure

On our first memories

By Jonathan Weiner Monday, December 23, 2024

SPOTLIGHT

Double Exposure

On our first memories

By Jonathan Weiner Monday, December 23, 2024

Books Essay

A Pleasure to Read You

Shouldn’t literature enchant, surprise, and teach us? And to make this happen, shouldn’t we be the most expert readers we can be?

Essays

Black Lives and the Boston Massacre

John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve always understood it, the ultimate
expression of principle and the rule of law

Book Reviews

Of Faith and Tragedy

A scholar of early Christianity on how her work informed her life

Portrait of the Artist

Dianna Frid

Interwoven Text

Works in Progress

Descent Into the Underworld

An excerpt from “How Do the Dead Walk”

Book Reviews

The Portrait Master

Known for rendering others, a writer turns his attention inward

American Places

Montana Sky

Commonplace Book

Winter 2019

Tuning Up

Made for You and Me

This land has contained our best and worst impulses

Web Essays

The Diagnostician of Despair

Why Rousseau believed that Enlightenment values would lead us to ruin

Asturias Days

Such as It Is

Read Me a Poem

“Guests” by Celia Thaxter 

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Next Line, Please

“What a Strange Path”

Three new prompts

Smarty Pants Podcast

Kinship and Contradictions

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz on the complexities of Native American identity

Tuning Up

Verde

Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew

Asturias Days

Cats and Dogs

Read Me a Poem

“Full Moon Rhyme” by Judith Wright

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Katie Heller Saltoun

Tenderness and grit

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current issue

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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Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

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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

Poetry

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Celebrating 20 years of poetry in the Scholar

Commonplace Book

Winter 2025

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)
Book Reviews

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Article

The Fair Fields
loading

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

Poetry

The Art of Tuning In

Celebrating 20 years of poetry in the Scholar

Commonplace Book

Winter 2025