SPOTLIGHT

The Diagnostician of Despair

Why Rousseau believed that Enlightenment values would lead us to ruin

By Robert Zaretsky Thursday, December 19, 2024

SPOTLIGHT

The Diagnostician of Despair

Why Rousseau believed that Enlightenment values would lead us to ruin

By Robert Zaretsky Thursday, December 19, 2024

Smarty Pants Podcast

The Future Is Feminist Book Collecting

How women are shaking up the rarefied world of antiquarian books

Asturias Days

Todos los Santos

Read Me a Poem

“The Sheep Child” by James Dickey

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Measure by Measure

Bewitching Sounds of Bronze

The maverick Lou Harrison

Essays

Where Did the Love Go?

Half-Century Reflections on 1968

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Inane and Insane

Is our world crazier than ever?

Next Line, Please

“It Was I”

Portrait of the Artist

Erick Antonio Benitez

Pre-Packaged Nature

Read Me a Poem

“The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

Poems read aloud, beautifully

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

Fiction

Magic Men

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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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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

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Celebrating 20 years of poetry in the Scholar

Commonplace Book

Winter 2025