Dreamers Rise

Daniel Defoe: I heard of one infected creature, who, running out of his bed in his shirt, in the anguish and agony of his swellings, of whi...

I've gone for a walk today, as I often do when I can spare the time. I put my things away, pulled on my jacket, and headed up the hillsi...

Two poems about change, stone, farming, New England — and, obliquely, the ancient world. First up, Robert Frost: Of the Stones of the Place...

There were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood when I was small, and most of the time I played with them, but I had another friend who...

Milan Kundera: Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judg...

Forest's edge, March 2016.

I don't know why this little body of water bears the name that it does. It's true that it's a bit isolated, though there's ...

Wintergreen. Of late I've been taking weekend walks in a nearby nature preserve. The most surprising thing about these walks may be the ...

Edward Gibbon on how the Roman emperor Diocletian, after abdicating the throne of his own free will, responded when his former co-emperor im...

At midnight, over the murmur of the wind, a knock at the door jolts us awake. It's a Roman centurion, in full regalia, but he's read...

Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is a dangerously narrow wheel-road, occupying the bed of a former torrent. Following this road to i...

We live on a small lot on a fully developed street a couple of blocks off the main drag in a busy suburban town. The train station and the ...

More than one hundred and fifty years ago, Austin Reed, an African-American inmate of New York State's Auburn State Prison, wrote a boo...

"I despise the looks of a novel. The cursed infernal things, I can't bear the sight of one. They are a curse to every one that read...

I grew up in a community of eighty or so houses built on a hill leading up from a small man-made lake. In the winter you could see the lake ...

From time immemorial the function of the prophet has consisted of one thing and one thing only: to cry down the wrath of the heavens upon th...

"Shake" is pretty much your typical Vulgar Boatmen song: understated but relentless, made up of lyrics stitched together from sc...

Everyone, at school, at home, in the street, told him cruel and ugly things about the Devil, and in his catechism book he saw him in Hell, e...

I'm re-posting this piece (with a couple of additional images) for two reasons: because I've just been leafing through my copy ...

There are two detailed primary sources, as well as a number of supporting documents, on the prosecution of Ernest de Lipowski (see previou...