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

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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“Full Moon Rhyme” by Judith Wright

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Katie Heller Saltoun

Tenderness and grit

Fiction

Magic Men

Smarty Pants Podcast

Too Much Future

How East German punks tore down the Berlin Wall

Read Me a Poem

“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Asturias Days

Fíjate!

Measure by Measure

State of Gliss

The art of Gloria Coates

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Naked and Unafraid

A place where women, and men too, are comfortable in their skin

Article

An Ostrich On Election Day

Eight Things to Distract You During the Midterms

Next Line, Please

Like People in Novels

A Year of Sonnets

November: A Sonnet

Portrait of the Artist

Christina A. West

Enter the Green Screen

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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

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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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