On being a docent at Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, as told to Katherine Hite.
From learning to haggle in the medina to connecting more deeply with history, two New York City high-school students reflect on visiting Africa for the first time.
Is Shakespeare Dead?: A cultural inferiority complex leads to a quirky vision of the Bard.
What are we celebrating when we memorialize world leaders?
Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.
Reflections 100 years after Typhoid Mary’s quarantine on North Brother Island.
A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown.
A historical perspective on language and the criminalization of African Americans.
This Columbus Day, a Caribbean carnival arts collective invokes the deeper principles behind Carnival masquerades to create social change.
Flash Fiction: Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son
Retracing Von Humboldt's footsteps, two centuries later, in a van.
At a Manhattan bookstore, Iraqi author Hassan Blasim’s reading touches off a discussion of more than just literature.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author looks inside 1979’s subterfuge and the lead-up to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Identity and amour in an Israeli kibbutz following the Six-Day War.
What World War I analogies reveal about the current tensions between China and Japan
Millions of Europeans saw World War I as a positive thing.
The fourth installment of The Social Author examines how literature lost its conversational dynamic, and why that’s a bad thing.
It was just another Friday afternoon in the CBS studios, until it wasn’t.
The third installment of The Social Author explores social authorship and holy texts.
A Lakota man from the Cheyenne River Reservation went to Rapid City for heart surgery and came back with Klan insignia carved into his chest.
Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale.
Updike described Boston’s iconic Fenway Park, celebrating its 100th anniversary this spring, as “a lyric little bandbox.” Pure poetry—and pure fantasy—writes our author.
| War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play. |