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Swing Time

When I was small, someone—maybe a librarian or maybe LeVar Burton—read me a story about an artist whose drawings came to life on ...

Favorite Books Of 201612.08.16

A few of you may have followed this annual list ever since I started posting it more than 15 years ago. Many of you have been tuning in long ...

The Middle Eastern Face of World War I11.16.16

Editor's Note: The multiyear centenary of World War I has generated a huge and still growing number of books, looking at the subject from ...

The Wrong Side of Goodbye11.08.16

If you have already been following the adventures of LAPD Detective Harry Bosch and, along the way, his half-brother, Mickey Haller ("the Lincoln ...

Mind the Gap?10.17.16

Social scientists do much of their work with little fanfare; some make names for themselves as experts on specific areas of concern, but most ...

Compassion for Difficult Fathers10.26.16

I prepared for Calvin College's 2014 Festival of Faith and Writing by reconnecting with an old high school friend, the fiction writer Peter ...

The Great Good Thing10.24.16

Some of my earliest memories are connected with church: the sounds and smells and distinctive aura of this place that was more than a place, ...

The Kingdom of Speech10.12.16

Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech adds to a growing body of popular books on the topic of how language, thought, and culture influence one ...

"The Worst Doesn't Unhappen, But . . ."10.11.16

Lists, lists, lists. The best books of this month, the best books of this week, the best books of this Tuesday … on and on. And of course ...

Teaching Us the Names10.07.16

With the publication of "Can Poetry Matter?" in 1991, Dana Gioia established himself as a provocative essayist and public intellectual, ...

Hairs vs. Squares10.05.16

With the cooler temperatures of autumn come falling leaves and the advent of playoff baseball. Springtime hopes of fans pass through the summer ...

Mercy Now09.04.16

We rarely need excuses to read novels as autobiographical. It's easier, after all, to believe that whatever in a fiction smacks of truth—the ...

Every Tongue Should Confess06.20.16

For the writing and reading of commentaries, it is the best of times. Of their publishing there is no end, and readers can select from a variety ...

Rethinking Apostolicity07.21.16

When I tell people that I recently moved from South Florida, their eyes are full of visions of mega-mansions and gaudy towers. But this, I think, ...

A Vaughan Williams Elegy06.20.16

Writing the biographies of politicians or generals requires no special language; the biographies of writers can, without much more difficulty, ...

How to Catch an Eel06.20.16

Though novelists Gina Ochsner and Paula Huston first met only five years ago, they've developed the kind of friendship that usually takes ...

"The Centrifugal Experience of Knowledge"06.20.16

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium." The content of print is speech; ...

Homegoing06.23.16

The opening pages of Homegoing—Ghanaian American Yaa Gyasi's debut novel—start a fire in Ghana that burns, one way or another, ...

Imagination Rules the World06.15.16

At a gathering of the conservative organization, The Philadelphia Society, a few years ago, Bradley Birzer gave a talk about Russell Kirk and ...

What Is America's Legacy?06.10.16

Last night I watched Broadway stars perform a ditty about Colonial-era rules for dueling in a mixture of Filipino Tagalog and English. I witnessed ...

World History from a New Angle04.19.16

The earth is a very big place.

Yes, it may be growing a bit smaller. (Google "shrinking globe" and you'll find dozens of essays ...

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