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by Joe Sharkey, New York Times
It's easy to forget, 130 years after outdoor electric lighting first case its glow through the night, that the sky is actually full of stars.
by Charles Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle
"How Fiction Works" is an audacious title, not only because explaining the mechanisms of fiction is a large task, but also because fiction doesn't seem to be working as well as it used to, if you take the decline in book sales as evidence. But if any contemporary critic is up to the task, it's James Wood, who has read more and better than the rest of us.
by Elizabeth Day, The Guardian
The world divides broadly into two types of people. THere are those who believe that the resemblance of sausages to male genitalia is a fund of endless ribaldry. And there are those who don't.
by Michael Scammell, New York Times
Most of the recent tributes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died earlier this month, have concentrated on his titanic struggle against the Soviet regime, and rightly so. But what seems to have gotten lost is the reason he was listened to in the first place — namely, his virtues as a writer.
by Constance Casey, Slate
A profusion of jellyfish is often described as an invasion or an attack. Which is laughable, given the guiding principle of jellyfish behavior—"whatever."
by Michael Donohue, The National
Around the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, a small crowd of foreign sympathisers came to help build the Maoist dream. Sixty years later, one of them is still there.
by Yasutaka Tsutsui, translated by Andrew Driver, Zoetrope
by Laura Miller, Salon
How do we know what we know? A new book takes a long view of knowledge, from ancient oral traditions to the rise of universities and the internet.
by Brett Levy, Los Angeles Times
Ironically, our future is expected to bring the descendants of mankind back to coping with the same issues we face today: environmental problems, high energy prices and a shortage of raw materials.
by Melena Ryzik, New York Times
Mainstream it's not — and that's just how the organizers like it.
by Micheline Maynard, New York Times
Running a restaurant has perhaps never been so tempting, thanks in part to the Food Network and celebrity chefs, but statistics show it is still very easy to fail.
by Frank Furedi, Spiked
Celebrating variant truths, like variant spellings, is presented as a pluralistic gesture of tolerance.
by Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times
The instructions on the red wrapper are very explicit: (1) Open the packaging. (2) Use both hands to break open the fortune cookie. (3) Retrieve and read the fortune. (4) Eat the cookie.
In China, such details are necessary, it seems.
by Anne Trubek, Good
Don't some of Holden's younger siblings deserve the end-of-the-year spot in sophomore English?
by Philip Schultz, Slate
by Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times
Does a real writer accept a gig doing books spun off from films or TV shows? A real writer found the answer to his own question.
by Michael Dickman, New Yorker
by Jeffrey Skinner, New Yorker
by Janet Frame, New Yorker
by Jeremy Caplan, Time
Short is in. Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing. Six-word memoirs. Four-word film reviews. Twelve-word novels. Mini-lit is thriving.
by Dan Southerland, Washington Post
I paid the bill at exactly 5.52 p.m. (I've kept the receipt as a souvenir) and decided I might as well call it a day and head home — with the butterfly. I phoned my wife, Muriel, to ask her to put off the movie she had planned to go to and wait for me, because I'd be bringing a butterfly home.
by Matthew Syed, The Times
I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is.
by Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
Once as essential to libraries as books themselves, silence is now as elusive as that stolen copy of Lord of the Flies - except it hasn't been pinched, it's been driven out.
by George Johnson, New York Times
Hawking's information paradox opened an arena in which two great theories of physics — general relativity, describing gravity, and quantum mechanics, describing everything else — duked it out.
by Steve Coates, New York Times
Is there anything in the Western literary canon with more abundant, potent or frolicsome offspring than Homer's "Odyssey"?
by Dexter Filkins, New York Times
What it's been like reporting a conflict that never seems to end.
by Dmitri Tymoczko, Seed
How do harmony and melody combine to make music?
by Ian Williams, The Guardian
Think of what would have happened to George Orwell's snappy title. 1984: One Man's Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that Sex with Comrades Can Have Torturous Consequences.
by Wang Xiaoni, translated by Pascale Petit, The Guardian
by Paul Collins, Slate
A cookbook titled A Treasury of Great Recipes sounds innocuous. What's frightening about noodle casserole? Why, nothing... except when it's cooked by Vincent Price.
by Jefferson Hunter, The Hudson Review
As unlikely as it seems—in the long history of the cinema, how many pictures, let alone boxing pictures, can have been based on a poem ?—the line is perfectly accurate.
by Eric G. Wilson, Chronicle Of Higher Education
American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life.
by Jane Mayer, New York Review Of Books
Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into histroy, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continue to be, a battle for the country's soul.
by Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
Blyton's gold medal positio in this table is evidence that it is the books we read, wholeheartedly, passionately, uncritically, in childhood to which we remain most firmly and irrevocably attached. The flaws we see in them as adults, the criticisms - and some pretty hefty ones, in the shape of accusations of sexism, racism and class snobbery have been flung Blton's way over the years - do not weaken those bonds.
by Naomi Alderman, The Guardian
Whether listening to music on our iPods, surfing the net, shopping or travelling, there's something seductive about randomness.
by Will Shortz, New York Times
A crosssword puzzle is a battle between the puzzle maker and editor on one side and the solver on the other. But unlike most battles, both sides here have the same goal — for the solver to win. A perfect puzzle may put up lots of resistance. It may, in fact, seem impossible at first. Ideally, though, in the end the solver should triumph and think, Oh, how clever I am!
by Gail Mazur, Slate
by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set
The idea of a "canon" is in tatters. A canon needs an established cultural authority, and there is no guiding authority in culture anymore.
by David Barnett, The Guardian
I expended time and imagination to absorb these stories. Why should people be entitled to think they know them without puttting in any effort?
by Rahul K. Parikh, Salon
Colorado doctors are under fire for performing infant organ transplants prematurely. But they made the right call.
by Daniel Gross, Slate
Food prices are soaring, so why are prices for the delicious crustacean falling?
by Mark Czarnecki, The Walrus
Evolutionary psychology takes evolution one step further: not only the body of Homo sapiens, but the human mind as well has been shaped by this process. How we think and feel has evolved over millennia, stretching back to our prehistory on the African savannah, and those ancient patterns stay with us, despite the cultural overlay of recorded history nd the wide spectrum of individual difference.
by Anne Enright, The Guardian
Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.
Naming characters is much less fraught.
by C. K. Stead, New Yorker
by Mahmoud Darwish, New Yorker
by Tobias Wolff, New Yorker
by Drake Bennett, Boston Globe
How imposters like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we're so eager to give it to them.
by Peter Gwin, Photograph by Mke Hettwer, National Geographic Magazine
How a dinosaur hunter uncovered the Sahara's strangest Stone Age graveyard.
by David Smith, The Guardian
Mlodinow's telling central permise is that our desire for control leaves us in denial about how important randomness is.
by Paul Tough, New York Times
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans public schools. It also created a rare chance to build a system that might solve the biggest problem in urban education — how to teach disadvantaged children.
by Walter Kirn, New York Times
This old-fashioned primer on literature from the esteemed critic James Wood concentrates on the art of the novel.
by Alexander Star, New York Times
Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right — approximately.
by Rachel Donadio, New York Times
Blurbings LLC traffics in "blurbs," the often hyperbolic declamations on book covers alerting readers that they're holding the greatest single work of literature since the Bible — or perhaps since "The Da Vinci Code."
by Bradford Plumer, The New Republic
What will happen when America can't afford to fly?
by Lennard Davis, The Common Review
Can we really think seriously about the bespectacled, neurotic schlemiel who stumbles through Take the Money and Run (1969) or Bananas (1971) as the true heir to the Western intellectual tradition?
by Emma Hagestadt, The Independent
The latest collection of historical love letters show sthat authors were a romantic lot. But are today's writers as handy with a pen?
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
David Lebedoff attempts to argue that George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, apparently polar opposites, were in fact soul mates.
by Thomas Meaney, Wall Street Journal
In a world where cities are on the rise, where the world is, in many respects, becoming a city, it behooves our leading architectural critics to structure our pressing needs into a solid argument. But Mr Kingwell has given us sketches when we need blueprints and reveries when we need concrete.
by Robert Fulford, National Post
The human face can reveal much about a person—whether they like it or not.
by Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
The view that everything is changing for the better is marketing propaganda—Google progressivism.
by Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
The New Criticism is too good and too serious to be dismissed as advertisement. It deserves to be remembered, instead, as the scaffolding on which the monument of modernism was raised.
by Laura Miller, Salon
Meteorology meets conspiracy in Rivka Glachen's exquisite first novel about a man who mistakes his wife for an impostor.
by Tony Ortega, Village Voice
A mystery solved with the help of a professor and a mobster's musician.
by Jordan Ellenberg, Slate
A mathematician explains the genius of the new gymnastics scoring system.
by Rachel Toor, Chronicle Of Higher Education
The difference between having a college degree and not having one is far greater than where you go to college. But where you go can determine, to a large extent, who you become. Some of us become jerks. And others spend our lives trying to figure out what it meant to have been there — and how to get over it.
by Teresa Cader, Slate
by Joseph Weisberg, New York Times
In "The Terminal Spy" Alan S. Cowell, a veteran foreign correspondent for The New York Times, gives an absorbing account of Mr Litvinenko's life and bizarre murder. Along the way he explains how Russia lost and got back its tremendous energy resources after the fall of the Soviet Union, describes how wealthy Russians have turned London into "Moscow-on-the-Thames" and tries to determine if the Litvinenko murder is the harbinger of a new and especialy dangerous kind of terrorism.
by Benedict Carey, New York Times
"Here's this art form gooing back perhaps to ancietn Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware" of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr Marthinez-Conde said.
by Kent Sepkowitz, New York Times
I think doctors have a strange way of grieving their patients.
by Michael Church, The Independent
Each language represents a particular kind of society, and a particular way of feeling and thinking. For those who speak it, it's the sum of human intelligence. We should all take note, and cherish our little grammar books.
by Mathew DeBord, Los Angeles Times
An encyclopedic look at traffic woes. Unfortunately, it goes nowhere.
by Stephen Elliott, San Francisco Chronicle
Paul Auster has captivated generations of readers with his expansive imagination and style - a style that could be called lazy, in the best sense of the word, like a dog with his tongue out, rolling in the sun. But this, his latest novel, is something else.
by Billy Baker, Boston Globe
Boston drivers are bad, but Boston pedestrians might be worse. Now some very smart people think they've got the answers to help everyone play nice on our roads.
by David Mehegan, Boston Globe
It may be hard to imagine that any of George Orwell's writings would be unread 58 years after his death. Generations of readers have been gripped by such classics as "Down and Out in Paris and London," "Homage to Catalonia," "Animal Farm," and especially "1984." However, most of even the most devoted aficionados haven't read Orwell's diaries.
by Caryn James, New York Times
Like so many adolescents, Doris Lessing swore never to be like "these sick and half crazy people, my parents." Unlike most, she became a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning writer, and in "Alfred and Emily" offers them the greatest gift she can: the lieves they might have had.
by Stephen Burt, New York Times
Herrera's worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free.
by Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair
Just months after his May 2007 election, French president Nicolas Sarkozy faced growing criticism over his stalled reforms, flashy style, and stormy divorce. The last straw should have been his whirlwind remarriage, to an Italian heiress, ex-model, and singer who had past liaisons with Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, among others, and nude photos all over the internet. But the lady in question, Carla Bruni, is proviing an unexpected asset.
by Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
Completed only a few days before the death of Arthur C. Clarke, "The Last Theorem" is a paean to the elegance of mathematics and th epower of the scientific method.
by Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, readers still display a surprising hunger for the definitive "9/11 novel."
by Julie Bindel, The Guardian
Eighty years after Radclyffe Hall wrote the radical novel The Well of Loneliness, is there still any need for novels to be categorised as lesbian?
by Philip Levine, Threepenny Review
by Michael Nielsen
Conventional wisdom holds that quantum mechanics is hard to learn. This is more or less correct, although often overstated. However, the necessity of abandoning conventional ways of thinking about the world, and finding a radically new way - quantum mechanics - can be understood by an intelligent person willing to spend some time concentrating hard.
by Nicholson Baker, New York Times
Ammon Shea, a sometime furniture mover, gondolier and word collector, has written an oddly inspiring book about reading the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary in one go.
Shea's book offers mor ethan exotic word lists, though. It also has a plot.
by Arun Venugopal, Salon
As U.S. newsrooms shrivel, India's are booming. And they're hiring, not firing reporters and editors.
by Emily Nunn, Chicago Tribune
The farm stand has a place in our hearts—and, we're happy to report, on MapQuest too.
by Steve E. Landsburg, Wall Street Journal
If you need both an operating system and a browser to get on the internet, would you rather acquire them from a single monopolist or from two competing monopolists?
by Jill Frayne, The Walrus
It's random and electric, and we are forever drawn to its deadly charms.
by David Plotz, Slate
August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.
by Timothy Williams, New York Times
Soul food is dying in Harlem and elsewhere in the city. The reasons can be chalked up to the vagaries of contemporary city life: Changing tatstes; health consciousness; the fast-food culture; and an influx of wealthier young adults — including African-Americans, long a customer base for soul food restaurants — who are more comfortable eating Indian or Thai dishes.
by Mathew Honan, Wired
The Clover coffeemaker debuted in a handful of cafes in 2006 and was promptly hailed as the best thing to happen to coffee lovers since the car cup holder.
by Michael Kenney, Boston Globe
By the time Michael Meyer arrived in 1997, Beijing's old neighborhoods were being gutted and rebuilt skyward in the run-up to this summer's Olympics.
by Guy La Roche, A Fistful Of Euros
Subtitlers do everything in their power to make sure people do not notice all their billiant solutions to difficult problems.
by David Ferry, Slate
by King Kaufman, Salon
We have the IOC to thank that if we're going to enjoy the running and jumpig, we'll have to ingore what's going on outside the venues. Just what China's government wants us to do.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
Behind every pretty picture of the universe there is a lot of dirty work that had to be done to capture it.
by Jerome Groopman, New Yorker
The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat.
by Matthew Dickman, New Yorker
by Joshua Ferris, New Yorker
On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness. And he would say, "Why do this to yourself?" He wanted to keep her from being hurt. He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to sit through another dinner party with the friend and her husband. But after a few months the rift would inevitably heal and the friendship return to good standing. He couldn't blame her. They went back a long way and you get only so many old friends.
by John Ashbery, New Yorker
by Heather Havrilesky, Salon
I was all fired up to svae for the future. Then I found out I was a day late and about, um, $90,000 short.
by Rebecca Johnson, Salon
I had an agent and a book deal for my first novel. All I was missing was quotes for the back cover. Next time, remind me to suck up to more famous writers.
by Richard Eder, Boston Globe
Childhood: not just another country or even another planet, but, in Catherine O'Flynn's delicate wilderness of a first novel, a tiny asteroid on collision course with our bloated planet.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
When people ask me if I have any rules for humor writing, I say: "Only one. I always try to put the funniest word at the end of the sentence underpants."
by Caroline Winter, New York Times
Why do we capitalize the word "I"? There's no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule "I" appears only in English.
by Nicholas Thompson, New York Times
Yes, a lot happened in this era. But no one is exactly sure what it meant - or what it should be called.
by Eric Konigsberg, New York Times
The mural, "At Home With Their Books," measures 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and depicts, in six chronologically ordered panels, the writing spaces of six authors who spent some, if not all, of their careers in New York.
by Jack Shafer, Slate
They're no longer the best providers of social currency.
by Andrew O'Hagan, Telegraph
George Orwell once described a warm beer and a country pub as being among the essential flavours of England. Nobody would claim that now: perhaps a blood red pair of Mad Dog 20/20s (two for the price of one) would more accurately summon the present atmosphere.
by David Jenkins, The Guardian
I'm having an identity crisis, because there's a new David Jenkins on the block, journalistically speaking.
by Paul Constant, The Stranger
There's always something wonderful about getting drunk with smart people, especially authors.
by Mattathias Schwartz, New York Times
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon
A new raft of chastity books laments a hookup culture that is hurting young women. As one of those young women, I beg to disagree.
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