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

Read Me a Poem

“Full Moon Rhyme” by Judith Wright

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Katie Heller Saltoun

Tenderness and grit

Fiction

Magic Men

Measure by Measure

The Conquered Ear

Roger Sessions’s Eighth Symphony, 50 years after its premiere

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Kanye and Ta-Nehisi

“This is my life, homie, you decide yours”

Portrait of the Artist

Peter Fiore

Lost in the Woods

Smarty Pants Podcast

Get Rich or Die Trying

In the shadow of the Silicon Valley of death

Un Beso y una Flor

Measure by Measure

An American in Berlin

Aaron Copland’s 1970 visit to Germany

View from Rue Saint-Georges

Time Well Spent

The life-affirming pleasure of childcare

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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