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

Asturias Days

Ojalá

Read Me a Poem

“Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Smarty Pants Podcast

Something Witchy This Way Comes

The social forces at work behind history’s favorite scapegoat

Measure by Measure

The Boy Romantic

Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his musical snowman

Web Essays

Writers and Friends

Remembering the fiction—and outsized personality—of Andre Dubus

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Strangely Familiar

Some places live in the imagination long before we visit them

Editors’ Picks

A Tingling Spine Every Time

Some of classical music’s most sublime moments

Next Line, Please

A Wardrobe of Excuses

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

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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)
Book Reviews

Divided Providence

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

Article

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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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Winter 2025