Feb 07 2026
Juicy, spice-rubbed chicken, ripe tomatoes, creamy avocado, melted cheese, and a cool cilantro-lime sauce make these chicken tacos the kind of dinner that feels special without requiring hours in the kitchen. The chicken cooks quickly in a hot skillet until browned around the edges, while a simple homemade pico de gallo brings plenty of fresh …
Feb 05 2026
William S. Burroughs never seemed particularly interested in making literature comfortable. His books fracture sentences, interrupt stories, scramble chronology, shift identities, and plunge readers into worlds of addiction, bureaucracy, surveillance, violence, sexuality, advertising, science fiction, black humor, and institutional control. Even among the writers of the Beat Generation, a group famous for challenging convention, Burroughs …
Feb 01 2026
Langston Hughes could hear poetry in places where other writers might have heard only noise. He heard it in blues singers and jazz bands, in conversations drifting through Harlem, in trains crossing the American landscape, in working people telling stories, in laughter that survived hardship, and in dreams that remained alive even when the world …
Jan 25 2026
When cold weather settles in, few meals are more satisfying than a steaming bowl of soup. Winter is the season for slow-simmered broths, creamy chowders, hearty beans, tender vegetables, fragrant spices, and crusty bread waiting on the side. A good soup warms the kitchen while it cooks and often tastes even better after the flavors …
Jan 25 2026
Born on January 25, 1759, Robert Burns became the poet most closely identified with Scotland, transforming the language, songs, landscapes, humor, struggles, and traditions of ordinary Scottish life into literature known around the world. His poems could be tender, mischievous, romantic, angry, political, satirical, and deeply compassionate, sometimes moving between several of those moods within …
Jan 23 2026
Born on January 23, 1919, Hans Hass became one of the great pioneers of twentieth-century underwater exploration, helping transform the sea from a mysterious world glimpsed from boats into a place ordinary people could experience through photographs, films, books, and television. The Austrian biologist, diver, filmmaker, photographer, inventor, and environmental thinker spent decades exploring coral …
Jan 19 2026
Born on January 19, 1969, Edwidge Danticat has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American and Caribbean literature, writing novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and books for younger readers that explore family, migration, grief, history, memory, and the complicated meaning of home. Born in Port-au-Prince and raised between Haiti and the United …
Jan 17 2026
Vietnamese cinema is far richer and more varied than international audiences sometimes realize. Its history encompasses wartime films made under extraordinarily difficult conditions, intimate rural dramas, postwar reflections, lush romantic films, martial-arts adventures, horror, queer cinema, family melodramas, independent productions, and some of Southeast Asia’s most accomplished contemporary art-house filmmaking. For decades, many Vietnamese films …
Jan 16 2026
Born on January 16, 1923, Anthony Hecht became one of the most accomplished American poets of the generation shaped by the Second World War, combining extraordinary formal control with an unflinching awareness of cruelty, mortality, memory, and moral responsibility. His poems could be elegant, learned, witty, musical, and technically intricate, yet beneath their polished surfaces …
Jan 07 2026
Few national cinemas have influenced world filmmaking as deeply as Japan’s. From the precise domestic dramas of Yasujirō Ozu and the sweeping samurai films of Akira Kurosawa to Godzilla, Studio Ghibli, J-horror, yakuza thrillers, experimental cinema, and the intimate contemporary work of Hirokazu Kore-eda and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Japanese filmmakers have repeatedly reshaped what movies can …
