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by Clyde Haberman, New York Times
John Updike defined "the true New Yorker" as someone who came with a "secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding."
The guy nailed it. In the depths of their souls, that is exactly how unreconstructed New Yorkers feel.
by John Allen Paulos, New York Times
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University for most of his life. His fanciful "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are quite familiar to us, as, to a lesser extent, are his photographs of young children. In "Lewis Carroll in Numberland," the distinguished British mathematician Robin Wilson has filled a perceived gap in the writings about Carroll by describing in a straightforward, jbberwocky-free fashion the author's mathematical accomplishments, both professional and popular.
by Roger Cohen, New York Review Of Books
I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions, so despairing of any peace that might terminate the dominion of the dead in favor of opportunity for the living.
by John Updike, New York Times
by Ian Brunskill, Wall Street Journal
A food critic remembers far-flung places and the meals of a lifetime.
by The Economist
American attitudes to stem-cell therapies are changing fast.
by Tim Harford, Slate
Why the NFL should replace the overtime coin toss with an auction system.
by Lorrie Moore, New York Times
It has been a hard year or so for writers. The world seems to grow emptier and emptier, depletion without replenishment, and now with the passing of John Updike at the age of 76, death has taken perhaps its biggest prize.
by Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"When a wise man dies," Rabbi David Wolpe asked at the memorial service for Book Soup owner Glenn Goldman, "how can he be replaced?"
For customers, employees, sales reps, writers and just about everyone who ever wandered into the Sunset Boulevard bookshop, this question has taken on an added significance in the wake of Goldman's death.
by John Updike, New Yorker
Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer's life retain a fascination.
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Endowed with an art student's pictorial imagination, a journalist's sociological eye and a poet's gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was argably this country's one true all-round man of letters, moving fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
by Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines, Slate
Health care reformers should look to the banking collapse as a cautionary tale.
by Judy Joo, Wall Street Journal
The analogies between the financial world and the world of restaurants don't stop in the kitchen.
by Tom Sleigh, New Yorker
by Molly Young, n+1
The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997.
by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
"A new breed of American has arrived on the scene," Dalton Conley declares in "Elsewhere, U.S.A.," his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are "intraviduals" defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage "the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds."
by Toni Bentley, New York Times
The first English-language edition of one of the very greatest writers on ballet, who witnessed the mythic Russian ballerinas of the early 20th century.
by William Deresiewicz, Chronicle Of Higher Education
As everyone seeks more and broader connectivity, the still, small voice speaks only in silence.
by Tom Junod, Esquire
As we move into the next era of American history, we need to reflect on the bizarre sequence of events we've experienced since 2000, and on how we — and not just George W. Bush — handled them.
by Cullen Murphy, Wall Street Journal
Penmanship skills are being slowly erased in a typing and texting age.
by Laura Miller, Salon
Is it really so terrible to grow old? Two new books explore what we can (and can't) learn from the elderly.
by Louis Menand, New Yorker
How the Voice changed journalism.
by Chris Jackson, Time
We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius.
by Brendan Boyle, City Journal
Robert Hutchins didn't think much of his Yale education, which he said had "nothing to do with any intellectual development." He didn't keep this opinion to himself. When the Yale class of 1921 elected him "most likely to succeed," he delivered a speech titled, "Should Institutions of Higher Learning Be Abolished?" Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time shows what an odd answer to this question Hutchins had in mind.
by Hilary Mantel, London Review Of Books
It was then June 1983. I had been in Saudi Arabia for six months.
by Eliot Spitzer, Slate
How cronyism and rent-seeking replaced "creative destruction."
by Lauren Shockey, Slate
Trying to re-create restaurant dishes at home.
by Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
Hammett's 'The Thin Man' should be taken seriously.
by Jill Lepore, New Yorker
The day the newspaper died.
by Frank Bidart, Slate
by Jim Robbins, New York Times
Forecasting avalanches has always been as much an art as a science because of the wide variability of conditions, from time of day and year to type of snow, to slope and temperature.
by David Mehegan, Boston Globe
We e-mail, we text, we Twitter - what will become of handwriting?
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Much has been made of Mr. Obama's eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while ocntextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.
by Robert Pinsky, New Yorker
by C. P. Cavafy, New Yorker
by Russell Smith, Globe And Mail
On New Year's Day, I rather idly threw out a question to the great cosmic ear, a question about the language of smell. I wondered aloud why all our words for smells seemed to be the words of real things — such as apple or ozone — while we had abstract words for colours (red) and other sensations (soft).
The massive response from scientists and poets of all stripes was overwhelming. It made clear two things: (1) science is hard (2) scientists tend to seek explanation from within their own disciplines.
by Toby Young, The Spectator
Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: 'You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.'
by Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times
People have asked for a generation whether newsweeklies would survive — but that is a more pressing question than ever, as the recession pummels the magazine industry. For now, the answer maybe that newsweeklies are already gone, having evolved into something else.
by Matt Ridley, National Geographic Magazine
The father of evolution would be thrilled to see the science his theory has inspired.
by Louis P. Masur, Chronicle Of Higher Education
Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique.
by Chris Mooney, Slate
The "war on science" is over. Now what?
by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times
France is the birthplace of luxury fashion, and here the recession biting the world has the feel of a morality play.
by Jim Fisher, Salon
Elizabeth Alexander has been commissioned to write a poem for Inauguration Day. But the checkered history of the form suggests it's an almost impossible task.
by Jonah Lehrer, Washington Post
The premise of Dutton's work is that this instinct for art isn't an accident. Instead, he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce.
by Steven L. Isenberg, The American Scholar
My meals with W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson.
by Neely Tucker, Washington Post
Real money. Lots of zeros. Getting scary, isn't it?
by Andrew F. Smith, Los Angeles Times
Over the last 200 years, food has been an integral part of the celebrations surrounding the transition of power from one American president to another.
by Kim Severson, New York Times
In Petworth, Columbia Heights, the U Street district and even the dicier parts of North Capital Hill, a little restaurant revival is under way. Washington neighborhoods that for years were considered too dangerous or too poor for a viable sit-down restaurant are suddenly entertaining quite a few.
by Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine
WHat are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it.
by Jill Lepore, New Yorker
If breast is best, why are women bottling their milk?
by Diane Mehta, Slate
The blue-black curve of weather sizzles when it smacks the asphalt.
Ocean air tumbles in, loosely shaped in networks of water.
by Sara Rimer, New York Times
For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100.
But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.
by Franz Wright, New Yorker
by Nathalie Anderson, New Yorker
by Marc Cooper
The slow-motion collapse of L.A. Weekly also coincides with a radical shriking of the L.A. Times, the implosion of The Daily News and the continuing downard descent of smaller papers likeCity Beat and The Daily Journal. If there was ever a time for an aggressive, irreverent, credible metro weekly to take on the Gray Lady, it's right now, right here. That requires investment, not layoffs — seriousness and not shoddy, half-arsed ideological crud passed off as news.
by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Times
The further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it's being exploited to create a narrative of redemption.
by Andrew Martin, New York Times
It wasn't too long ago that McDonald's, vilified as making people fat, was written off as irrelevant. Now, six years into a rebound spawned by more appealing food and a less aggressive expansion, McDonald's seems to have won over some of its most hardened skeptics.
by Steven Pinker, New York Times
Like the early days of the internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
by Caleb Crain, New York Times
A new anthology of radical children's literature shows that Marxist principles have been dripping steadily into the minds of American youth for more than a century.
Hear Also: Tales For Little Rebels, from The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC.
by John McQuaid, Smithsonian Magazine
Explosives and giant machines are destroying Appalachian peaks to obtain peaks. In a tiny West Virginia town, residents and the industry fight over a mountain's fate.
by Dushko Petrovich, Boston Globe
As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing more than shoe boxes full of memories.
by Alison Flood, The Guardian
Phil Buehler said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film.
by David Colman, New York Times
Beards have had their moment, now it's time for mustaches to get their 10 minutes of fame.
by Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic
Can America's paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?
by Thomas Goetz, Wired
Despite a proven model, early detection is an afterthought in cancer research.
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
People priase chicken soup, especially in these chilly, Kleenex-ridden days, but a bowl of it is usually greeted politely — not rapturously. Purists find pleasure in a clear, golden broth with a few perfect dice of carrot and egg noodles, but the taste? Dull, honestly. Bland, even.
Enter, steaming: the rich, spicy chicken noodle soups of Southeast Asia.
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar
I never felt the pain of unbelief until I believed. But belif itself is hardly painless.
by T.R. Hummer, Slate
by Laura Miller, Salon
Mark Bittman's revolutionary "Food Matters" is both a cookbook and a manifesto that shows us how to eat better — and save the planet.
by Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine
I'm sorry, did that sound snarky? I apologize.
by William Safire, New York Times
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of "dirty words." (Titillating, from the Latin titillare, "to tickle," is clean.)
by Rebecc Skloot, New York Times
It's no longer just guide dogs for blind people. Service animals now include monkeys for quadriplegies, parrots for psychotics and at least one assistance duck. Should the law recognize all of them?
by Terri Trespicio, Boston Globe
Can the wrong pair of jeans throw a first date into serious doubt?
by Ian Bostridge, Standpoint Online
If the world of physics is a space-time continuum, music is a pitch-time continuum.
by Michelle Green, New York Times
The city known for its shrines, temples and blazing autumn hills is celebrating the millennial anniversary of Murasaki Shikibu's episodic story of love and loss among the imperial set.
by Sarah Fay, New York Times
This novel traces the delightfully absurd affair between a Belgian language teacher and her Japanese student.
by Ellen Ullman, New York Times
I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.
by William Birdthistle, Wall Street Journal
The case for seeing Ireland and its literature in a fresh way — free of Celtic lore.
by Gary Lutz, The Believer
And as I encountered any such sentence, the question I would ask myself in marvelment was: how did this thing come to be what it now is?
by Alex Williams, New York Times
In a season of change, in a year of change, most people who embark on a journey of self-renewal can expect anything but.
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