“I might add that portraiture is also a tender art. It tries to hold onto what can’t be contained, which is life itself and a clear view of it.”
Every Portrait Tells a Lie
May Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Letter From the Editor May: The Sticky Little Leaves, the Blue Sky
Springtime ramblings.
How to Love an Owl
I felt like the owl mother to the whole family. I wanted to spread my wings and cover the whole nest, and the father in the neighboring tree as well. To keep them safe and protected, from predators and bad weather and falls, and from us.
More Than Half a Poet: The Grasmere Journals
It’s a strange but probably not-so-strange thing that a beautifully-written account of the baking of bread, of illness and worry, of the beauty of the light on flying crows, the wind on the water, the glow through the mountains, would have such an enduring power to move us.
April Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
The Legendary Iranian Poet Who Gives Me Hope
“Read Forugh’s poems and you’ll find the very forces that shape our moment: misogyny, censorship, nativism, consumerism, the annihilating violence of war. Read her poems and you’ll find that they, like all the best poems, don’t merely offer a reprieve from the abuses and terrors of the world, but a repudiation of the forces that make those abuses and terrors possible: ignorance and political regimes for which ignorance has been and will always be their life’s blood.”
Miep Gies: What Any Decent Person Would Have Done
“I am not a hero. I am not a special person, because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. I did what any decent person would have done.”
The Brown Bag of Miscellany’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure
A beautiful and thought-provoking essay on the films of Zora Neale Hurston, by Autumn Womack.
November Issue, 2025
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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