SPOTLIGHT

A Story for Christmas

By Clellan Coe Wednesday, December 25, 2024

SPOTLIGHT

A Story for Christmas

By Clellan Coe Wednesday, December 25, 2024

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

Essays

Orwell’s Last Neighborhood

While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four

Works in Progress

The Ghosts in the Hills

“One person’s secluded paradise is another person’s isolated nightmare.”

Arts

The Fantastical Little Dyer

Few artists could match Tintoretto’s mastery of color and form—or his sense of playfulness

Essays

At Play in the Fields of the Bored

America’s newest city parks are chock-full of things to do—but what happened to the delights of idle time in a natural setting?

Book Reviews

His Life Spoke Volumes

The man behind the great Enlightenment encyclopedia

Essays

The Man Behind the Counter
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A neighborhood grocer, inscrutable and gruff, lingers mysteriously in my memory

Editor's Note

Trials

A Year of Sonnets

March: A Sonnet

NEWSLETTER

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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

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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

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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