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

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

Read Me a Poem

“Who Is This” by Rabindranath Tagore

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Web Essays

Ramona the Pest, Cleary the Friend

Remembering the prolific children’s author

Letter From

The Sierra Nevada: Wildfires in the Wilderness

Fire in California has a split personality

Viral Days

Quarantining with Heidegger

For the time being, it’s salad, snuggles, and Being and Time

Smarty Pants Podcast

The Cherry Blossom Evangelist

How an English eccentric saved Japan’s beloved sakura—and spread them around the world

Viral Days

Twenty-seven Boxes

When a lifetime’s worth of artifacts and memories arrived at my door

Asturias Days

Two Pablos

Article

Jacques Barzun and Friend

What did a distinguished historian, and possibly a great man, see in an unkempt young would-be writer?

Read Me a Poem

“Home Burial” by Robert Frost

Poems read aloud, beautifully

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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

Poetry

The Art of Tuning In

Celebrating 20 years of poetry in the Scholar

Commonplace Book

Winter 2025