SPOTLIGHT

A Story for Christmas

By Clellan Coe Wednesday, December 25, 2024

SPOTLIGHT

A Story for Christmas

By Clellan Coe Wednesday, December 25, 2024

Web Essays

A State of Perpetual Unease

Sartre’s essay on French anti-Semitism cast the problem in existential terms

Article

Shooting a Dog

During a deployment in Iraq, a young soldier confronts a fundamental paradox about the masculine temperament in wartime

Asturias Days

Lighting a Match

Read Me a Poem

“The Coming of Light” by Mark Strand

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Tammy West

Climate grief (without despair)

Asturias Days

Go Gentle

Read Me a Poem

Selections from Hafiz’s Little Book of Life

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Cover Story

In the Forest of the Colobus

At a Gambian nature reserve, troops of endangered monkeys—and numerous other creatures—enact a grand drama that plumbs the mysteries of life, death, and regeneration

Article

Notes From the Front

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended

Read Me a Poem

“Snow” by Louis MacNeice

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Article

Double Exposure

On our first memories

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

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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)
Book Reviews

Divided Providence

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

Article

The Fair Fields
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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

The Art of Tuning In

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