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

Web Essays

The Baritone as Democrat

How Lawrence Tibbett prophesied the Metropolitan Opera crisis of today

Asturias Days

Échame la Culpa

Read Me a Poem

“Defeat” by Kahlil Gibran

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Kat Wiese

Taking flight

Smarty Pants Podcast

Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things

Tuning Up

The Patron Subjects

Who were the Wertheimers, the family that sat for a dozen of John Singer Sargent’s paintings?

Asturias Days

All in Your Head

Read Me a Poem

“A Prayer for My Daughter” by W. B. Yeats

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Web Essays

My Cousin Manya

One survivor’s story

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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