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by Laura Cumming, Guardian
Fertility in art is generalised, if I may so generalise. It is an attribute in search of a body.
by David Itzkoff, New York Times
Fast food has always been an especially effective stimulant of the synapses that link my unrefined palate to the pleasure center of my brain, and it seems to do so in direct proportion to the obscurity of the restaurant chain that served it.
by Kate Stone Lombardi, New York Times
In many households, the pots and pans are all but retired with the emptying of the nest. No more countless supermarket runs — just the occasional small shopping trip. No more nightly grind of turning out balanced meals with protein, vegetables and a starch. No more scrubbing pots and pans. You trade all that for freedom.
And that's the part that baffles me. Freedom from what? Eating tasty, home-cooked meals?
by Raymond Bonner, New York Times
A young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in "The Second World" that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — "a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources." The three are the United States, the European Union and China.
by Steven Brill, New York Times
Grishma sticks with his formula for the villains in "The Appeal." But he paints a more complicated picture of the heroes, while making an important point about how the justice system in more than half of the 50 states is increasingly threatened by the kind of big-money gutter politics that have made so many Americans disgusted with Washington.
by Ty Burr, Boston Globe
As one starlet after another goes off the rails, what kind of exmaple are they setting for American girls? Maybe a good one. Meet a new cultural force: the anti-role model.
by Geraldine Bedell, Guardian
Women are in a bad way. We are still mae scapegoats and traduced and our true natures denied. Two female polemicists have published books explaining why, although they ahve come to very different, arguably opposing conclusions. One is also very much better than the other.
by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times
The dumbing-down of discourse has been particularly striking since the 1970s. Think of the devolution of the emblematic conservative voice from WIlliam Buckley to Bill O'Reilly. It's enough to make one doubt Darwin.
by Rachel Donadio, New York Times
Let's face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who'd throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.)
by Andrew Bird, New York Times
What is becoming more challenging of late is dealing with so many fully formed melodies that are unwilling to change their shape for any word. So writing lyrics becomes like running multiple code-breaking programs in your head until just the right word with just the right number of syllables, tone of vowel and finally some semblance of meaning all snap into place.
by Margaret Atwood, Guardian
The story of an orphaned, talkative, redheaded 11-year-old sent to a remote farm by mistake, Anne of Green Gables was an instant success in 1908 and, a century later, is still loved by girls from Canada to Japan.
by Lawrence Grobel, Los Angeles Times
We printed 2,000 copies of each issue and sold them for 50 cents each. So, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that Amazon.com had a listing under my name that said: "SATYR. Paperback. Used. $366."
by Philip Hensher, Prospect
The "state of the nation" novel is back in fashion, with recent examples from Hanif Kureishi, Sebastian Faulks and Louis de Bernieres. But many of these books focus too closely on "authentic" period detail at the expense of convincing characters and stories.
by Tim Harford, Slate
Does evolution explain why we hate to pay more for scarce goods?
by James Poniewozik, Time
For better or worse, Fox became the signal cultural artifact of the Bush era, so it will need to remodel itself again.
by Fiona McFarlane, Zoetrope
When I tell our husbands the story of the bad-luck Americans, I begin with Edith because whent he Americans came, moving into the airstrip out of town, expanding it with new buildings and sheds and hangars, bringing with tme a brass band that practiced in the streets of a Saturday, I thought of the planes that hummed over our newly crowded sky as tiny Ediths with their parrot faces pointed toward the sun.
by Travis Nichols, Poetry Foundation
The zen of Philip Whalen.
by John Freeman, Guardian
The sheer amount of reviews we can now access has taken some of the joy out of books.
by Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times
Mothers of America, Disney wants to destroy you.
by Brian Boyd, The American Scholar
The delight we get from detecting patterns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood.
by William Leith, Telegraph
If I tell you that this book is about reading, that doesn't sound very interesting, does it? It conjures up the impression of somebody sitting on a chair, holding a book or newspaper, not appearing to do very much.
But this book is, at least in parts, blindingly fascinating. Its point is that, when you sit on a chair and pick up a book, a huge amount of stuff is happening.
by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times
At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wndered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or "Western food," in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.
by Henry Alford, New York Times
When I heard that the food you can by at 99-cent stores is more diverse than you might imagine, I decided to conduct an experiment. I'd make dinner every night for a week using mostly ingredients bought at these stores and then, on the eighth night — once I'd gotten my game down — I'd prepare a meal for friends made only from ingredients bought at 99-cent stores.
by David Segal, Washington Post
The soon-to-be-unveiled museum devoted to the sanitation workers of New York — do not call them garbagemen — will prompt smart alecks to wonder: Are they just cranking out museums for anybody these days?
by Kevin Barents, Slate
by Michael Gecan, Boston Review
Urban decline moves to the suburbs.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
What she wanted, she said, was to capture the nuances of characters who happened to have children and happened not to work.
by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post
No one involved in the preparations for this year's Olympics really believes that this is "only about the athletes," or that the Beijing Games will be an innocent display of sporting prowess, or that they bear no relation to Chinese politics. I don't see why the rest of us should believe those things, either.
by Nicholas A Basbanes, Los Angeles Times
A biblophile writes a love letter about his passion.
by Stanley Moss, New Yorker
by Jeffrey Eugenides, New Yorker
by David Owen, New Yorker
They're horrid and useless. Why do pennies persist?
by Eric Alterman, New Yorker
The death and life of the American newspaper.
by Sloane Crosley, Salon
I had all these romantic notions about one-night stands. Who knew it would be so diffcult to actually have one?
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
On the night last week after Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer and space visionary, died at the ripe age of 90, it was cloudy and threatening rain in New York. I was frustrated because I wanted to go outside to see if the stars were still there.
by Michael Barbaro and Christine Haughney, New York Times
The collapse of a major financial institution is usually an occasion for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over potential job losses, lower consumer spending and missed mortgage payments.
In New York City, it's also seen as an opportunity.
by Peter A. Thiel, Policy Review
In the long run, there are no good bets against globalization.
by Ben Ehrenreich, New York Times
While Canada is still a relative haven for asylum-seekers, its immigration laws have tightened sharply, and prime minister Stephen Harper has been a faithful ally of the Bush administration.
by Laura Fraser, San Francisco Chronicle
Not long after I moved into the Haight-Ashbury, more than 20 years ago, a hippie friend gave me a redwood seedling and told me to go plant a tree.
by Dave Itzkoff, New York Times
In a world where technology evolves so rapidly that the present already feels like the future, will a modern-day author ever inherit Mr. Clarke's aura of prescience? Do any of his successors share his apparent talent for envisioning technological breakthroughs before they are realized?
by Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times
While the United States remains focused on the Middle East, China quietly and relentlessly creeps forward as a national security challenge.
by Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post
A cultural critic recounts how comics were ripped out of kids' grubby hands.
by Sebastian Horsley, The Observer
I am a connoisseur of prostitution: I can take its bouquet, taste it, roll it around my mouth, give you the vintage.
by Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times
If you approach Renzo Piano's Paris office from the Seine, it looks like just another bourgeois entranc — simple name-plate, passage, bell, metal door. If you approach it from the north, though, you immediately see why the sign reads not "Renzo Piano Architect" but "Renzo Piano Building Workshop".
by Robert Kolker, New York Magazine
Homelessness is the single biggest failure of the Bloomberg administration, which has tried a radcial new policy that's made an interactable problem worse. Thee are ovrer 35,000 homeless now in the city. On a single cold night in February, we met six of them.
by Paul Collins, Slate
Why won't phone books die?
by Paul Krugman, New York Times
It's time to relearn the lessons of the 1930s, and get the financial system back under control.
by The Economist
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter.
by Lisa Belkin, New York Times
This week, when it comes time to press "print" on my dozens of pages of data, I froze.
by Andrew Leonard, Salon
I remember as if it was yesterday the anticipatory rush that flooded through me as I began to turn that first page on a new (to me) science fiction novel from a giant like Arthur C. Clarke. I remember the happy expectation that my mind was about to be blown.
by Harriet Rubin, Portfolio.com
Weren't we supposed to be beyond this by now? After years of progress, women's gains at work have come to a baffling halt.
by Les Murray, New Yorker
by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker
by Patrick McVay, Boston Globe
It was my own money, and if I wanted to look ridiculous, that was my business.
by Alexander Star, New York Times
If horses can alter their own brain chemistries at will (and have good reasons to do so), what about human beings?
by Anna Jane Grossman, Washington Post
A fond farewell to 209 once-common things that are either obsolete or well on the way.
by Matt Weiland, New York Times
The 1970s saw the emergence of a new hero: the stand-up comic.
by John Gray, Guardian
The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics.
by Roger Cohen, New York Times
The view persists that a rose is a rose is a rose. But that's so 20th century! In this new era a rose is a global product vested with the power to bring social and environmental change.
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
The chefs are not only cooking and plating the food, but also serving it, taking coats, recommendign wine and confirming reservations.
by Andreas Viestad, Washington Post
When was the last time anyone asked how you would like your fish cooked: medium, or medium-rare?
by Alessandra Stanley, Vanity Fair
The idea that women aren't funny—and which male said that?—seems pretty laughable these days. TV has unleashed a new generation of comediennes, who act, perform stand-up, write, and direct—dishing out the jokes with a side of sexy.
by Rosanna Warren, Slate
by John Burnside, New Yorker
by Amy Reiter, Salon
Swingers, short skirts, blowup dolls and big hearts: "Love American Style" taught a generation of kids about sex. So how does it look now that we're all grown up?
by Carolyn Y. Johnson, Boston Globe
Don't check that e-mail. Don't answer that phone. Just sit there. You might be surprised by what happens.
by Julie Bick, New York Times
Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.
by Liza Mundy, Washington Post
When Dave Kendall promised to love Diana "in sickness and in health," he meant it.
by Darshak Shanghavi, Boston Globe
Maria and Jose Azevedo had to choose: allow their baby to die a preventable death or save him while acting against their religion. The doctor who helped guide them shares their story.
by Jim Holt, New York Times
Is altruism really best understood as an urge wired into us by selfish genes?
by The Economist
Recent scientific progress means that ever more imaginative scenarios have begun to look feasible.
by Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, Scientific American
An accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins.
by Joel Achenbach, National Geographic Magazine
The hunt for the God particle.
by Bob Thompson, Washington Post
Two words: Fact check!
by Stephen Marche, Salon
Alain Robbe-Grillet turned the masses against inventive fiction. Now that he's dead, will experimental writing make a comeback?
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name.
by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate
Why are book editors so bad at spotting fake memoirs?
by Linda Pastan, Slate
by Stephen Dunn, New Yorker
by Hari Kunzru, New Yorker
We liked to do things casually. We called at the last minute. We messaged one another from our hand-held devices.
by Christopher Hitchens, Slate
Cliche, not plagiarism, is the problem with today's pallid political discourse.
by Tom Keane, Boston Globe
More and more, the job of running a municipality seems better-suited to a professional manager.
by Elizabeth Weil, New York Times
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children's public education and the separate crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience.
by Chuck Klosterman, The Believer
What's the difference between a road movie and a movei that just happens to have roads in it?
by Joseph Tartakovsky, Los Angeles Times
Understanding the great scribes' fondness for alcohol.
by Dennis OVerbye, New York Times
You might think we have made some headway in finding extraterrestrial life since the dawn of the space age. But you would be wrong.
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