Subscribe to Jasper. Word of the Day: LARVA Have you ever seen a butterfly crawling on the top of a leaf, munching away at the edges? “Butterflies don’t crawl!” you tell me. “Butterflies FLY!” Yes, they do, but not all the time. In the early stages of its life, the butterfly, as you probably know,...

Subscribe to Jasper. Story of the Day: A Dog and a Glacier “Come on, boy, come on, Stickeen!” cried the man. The wind was blowing hard and it was starting to snow. It had rained most of the day, and now it was a dark twilight, and the man was soaked all through. That didn’t...

Subscribe to Jasper. Word of the Day: WRONG “That’s just WRONG,” said the boy, as he watched his friend put ketchup on his ice cream. “Don’t you like ketchup on your ice cream?” “It’s WRONG. Now if it was mustard, that would be different.” Did you ever wonder why in English we have words like...

Subscribe to Jasper. Painting of the Day: Breaking Home Ties by Norman Rockwell Nobody in America was ever better at painting a story than was Norman Rockwell. How can you paint a story? A story goes from one day to the next, while a painting can show you only one moment. You’d need hundreds of...

Subscribe to Jasper. Poem of the Day: “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats Other children liked having birthdays, but I never looked forward to them. And now I know for certain that I have seen far more birthdays than I will ever see again. My dog Jasper grows old, but he doesn’t...

Subscribe to Jasper Word of the Day: DISCIPLE You are in school one day, when a creature from Mars walks into your room. He turns his antennas toward the teacher and they start to vibrate and hum. That is how creatures from Mars talk, as you know. “Are – all – these – chil-a-der-en yours?”...

Subscribe to Jasper. Story of the Day: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett Jesus warns us that unless we become like little children, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Our salvation comes from a child, because Jesus was that child whom prophets and seers foretold. He was the son whose mysterious name...

Subscribe to Jasper. Man of the Day: Saint John Bosco How would you like to have as your friend a big gray dog who looks like a shaggy wolf, who seems to appear out of nowhere when you’re in trouble, and when you look around after the bad men have run away, he’s gone? A...

Subscribe to Jasper. Painting of the Day: Snap the Whip (1872) by Winslow Homer I told my students once that if they ever saw me walking down the street singing a war song in Welsh, at the top of my lungs – Ni chaiff gelyn ladd ac ymlid, Harlech! Harlech! Cwyd iw herlid – they...

Dr. Anthony Esolen, Professor and Writer-in-residence at Magdalen College, was recently published in Crisis Magazine. His article, titled “First Things First,” highlights an important feature of Magdalen College. Compared to the “critical” approach found on many college campuses, at Magdalen we are grateful to “heroic modern souls who sought the truth and told of what...