YIVO studied a living Yiddish culture. What happened when that world was nearly destroyed?

Click Here to Read or Listen to: YIVO studied a living Yiddish culture. What happened when that world was nearly destroyed? Kalman Weiser’s new history follows the institute from Vilna to New York, where it had to preserve a vanished world and cultivate a future By Andrew Silow-Carroll on the JTA website on  October 11, 2026.

A Place Among the Fiddlers

Click Here to Read: A Place Among the Fiddlers: In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out by David Alm on the Longreads website on October 1, 2026.

Jamming around the grounds at the 2012 Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention in Galax, Virginia on August 11, 2012. Image: Eli Christman from Richmond, VA, USA  Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

‘He would have been the center of everything’: the art exhibition imagining if Emmett Till lived.

Click Here to Read:  ‘He would have been the center of everything’: the art exhibition imagining if Emmett Till lived. Dedicated to the boy whose  lynching partially ignited the US civil rights movement, the new exhibition celebrates Black creativity and invites audiences to reckon with racism in America by Briana Ellis-Gibbs on The Guardian website on September 13, 2026.

Emmett Till in 1954 Image: Mamie Till Bradley.  Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

How a Creative Mind Lives In Nature

Click Here to Read:  How a Creative Mind Lives In Nature: Working in the wilderness could not satiate my intellectual impulses. But for the protagonist of “Hothouse Bloom,” the binary between mental and physical labor is what calls her by  Dan Sinykin in the Nation Magazine on September 5, 2026.

A shepherd and his flock in a landscape. Attributed to Johann Heinrich Roos (1631–1685) Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.