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Things Worth Remembering
The Free Press presents great literary treasures—from William Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace and beyond—that we should commit to heart.
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Things Worth Remembering: Our Founding Mother
Printer Mary Katharine Goddard risked British retaliation in 1777 when she produced the first widely distributed copy of the Declaration of Independence…
Norah O'Donnell
Things Worth Remembering: The Iranian Movie to Watch This Weekend
If you want some sense of what life’s been like in Tehran—watch the dark and captivating Iranian vampire film, ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.’
Kat Rosenfield
Things Worth Remembering: To Sit at the Same Table
A stanza from ‘The House by the Side of the Road’ became my family’s reminder that no argument can float too far from the deeper connection of love…
Keaton Swett
Things Worth Remembering: The Day Jesse Jackson Asked for Forgiveness
In 1984, after alienating American Jews and losing his bid for the presidency, the late Jesse Jackson delivered a concession speech that remains a…
Eli Lake
Things Worth Remembering: James Van Der Beek Was the Best of Us
The ‘Dawson’s Creek’ star, who died Wednesday at 48, sought to teach his kids “how easy it can be to laugh, to love, to cry, to learn . . .and to find…
Mary Katharine Ham
Things Worth Remembering: Friction Makes Life Worth Living
Technology promises to alleviate every inconvenience. But as Kurt Vonnegut said in 1995, aren’t the annoyances we’re racing to erase the very things…
Josh Kaplan
Things Worth Remembering: Elvis Costello Brought Poetry to Life
What a shame that conventional wisdom deems most poetry inaccessible. And what a beautiful thing that music so often proves that belief wrong.
Peter Richmond
Things Worth Remembering: The Poem That Outlived the Holocaust
Every year, millions around the world honor the victims of the Holocaust by singing Hannah Senesh’s poem, ‘Eli, Eli’: five imperfect lines about a…
Douglas Century
Things Worth Remembering: MLK’s Final Act of Faith
‘Somewhere I read of freedom,’ said Martin Luther King Jr. in the last speech of his life. Most of us today don’t need to read of our rights to know…
Jonathan Eig
Things Worth Remembering: ‘Good Night, World’
Jacob Glatstein’s 1938 poem ‘Good Night, World’ reads today as a warning and a responsibility: Night for the Jews is night for the values a free society…
Ruth R. Wisse
Things Worth Remembering: Orwell Saw This Coming
Days after Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor, Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ feels more relevant than ever.
Charles Lane
Things Worth Remembering: The Divine Beauty of Imperfection
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ teaches us to see in every speckled, contradictory thing an icon of the God who did not disdain to be born among…
Robert A. Sirico
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