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Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times
Jockey International Inc. has documented that the first pair of its men's brief-style underpants was sold at Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago on Jan. 19, 1935. And, although it is undocumented, it's more than likely that the first wedgie was administered later that same day in the parking lot of that Marshall Field's. Tweet
Dwight Garner, New York Times
In all of the gonzo testimony about Stonewall, however, no reaction to the rioting has struck me as being so painfully honest (or so funny) as the novelist Edmund White’s. He was there at the Stonewall Inn when it erupted, he writes in his new memoir, “City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.” And when all hell broke loose, his initial response was to sit and stew and cluck. Tweet
John T. Edge, New York Times
In the northern reaches of West Virginia, along a corridor of Appalachia stretching from Buckhannon, through Clarksburg, up to Morgantown, an appetite for pepperoni rolls cuts across class strata. Tweet
Joyce Hor-Chung Lau, New York Times
To prepare for the National Day holiday, retailers here have been stocking up on merchandise like designer bags, gold jewelry — and banned books. Tweet
Frank Gallimore, Slate Magazine Tweet
Richard Dorment, The New York Review of Books
Just as Monroe understood that you don't have to act for the camera in the way the stage-trained Olivier defined acting, so Warhol realized that you don't need to make art for an audience brought up on film and television in the way Kenneth Clark defined art. Actress and artist grasped that in the modern world, presentation counts for more than substance. The less you do, the greater may be the impact. Tweet
Fran Schumer, New York Times
Some experts argue that complicated grief should not be considered a separate condition, merely an aspect of existing disorders, like depression or post-traumatic stress. But others say the evidence is convincing. Tweet
Drake Bennett, Boston Globe
The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world. Tweet
Nancy Franklin, New Yorker
Two major show-business developments in the past half decade have inspired a combination of puzzlement, vexation, and dread, and both of them involved Jay Leno and NBC. Tweet
James Wood, New Yorker
The scientific fictions of Richard Powers. Tweet
George Saunders, New Yorker Tweet
Lia Purpura, New Yorker Tweet
Charles Wright, New Yorker Tweet
John Cassidy, New Yorker
The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone. Tweet
Robert Sullivan, New York Times
One of the great battlefields in the war between bicyclists and pedestrians in New York City is the Brooklyn Bridge. Pedestrians think all bicyclists are out-of-control maniacs; bicyclists — the majority, anyway — are just trying to avoid cars and not break a sweat. The stripe painted down the center of the elevated Brooklyn Bridge walkway, to separate bicyclists from pedestrians, has become a line in the sand. We need to erase that line once and for all. Tweet
Samuel Arbesman, Boston Globe
The true story of one man's quest to give George Plimpton a permanent presence in orbit. Tweet
Arthur Krystal, New York Times
So the next time you hear a writer on the radio or catch him on the tube or watch him on the monitor or find yourself sitting next to him at dinner, remember he isn’t the author of the books you admire; he’s just someone visiting the world outside his study or office or wherever the hell he writes. Tweet
Jim Holt, New York Times
Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler. Tweet
Edmund White, New York Times
Most of the unconditional admirers of New York are from elsewhere. People like me, who grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s, couldn’t wait to trade in “the provinces” for the Big Apple, and half a century later we’re still besotted with its incomparable vitality. But Michael Greenberg, a native New Yorker, loves the city as a child loves a parent, and in its honor he has put together a collection of tightly written, incisive chapters, each another tessera or tile in a big mosaic — and like tesserae, they are all placed at a slightly different angle to the light. Tweet
Dinah Lenney, Los Angeles Times
The poet wishes more people would realize that her medium doesn't hurt. At all. Tweet
Grady Hendrix, Slate Magazine
Don't mess with them. Tweet
Marianne Freiberger, Plus Magazine
Imagine hurtling through the desert at 1000mph in a rocket powered car, far outstripping the speed of sound, only to emerge, "shaken, deafened and cooked," as the fastest human being on land. Andy Green, Royal Air Force fighter pilot and Oxford maths graduate, is currently gearing up for just this experience, for the second time around. Tweet
Stephen Regenold, New York Times
The Devil’s Path, an east-to-west voyage along the spine of the Catskills, is often cited as the toughest hiking trail in the East. In 25 miles it ascends six major peaks, plunging into deep valleys between climbs. Tweet
James Ellroy, Powell's Books
Historical fiction affords novelists the opportunity to rewrite great events to their own specifications. They must begin by adhering to rigorous facts and are then freed to extrapolate at their imaginative will. Known history serves as subtext. Readers come to historical fiction with some knowledge of the eras they are about to immerse themselves in. Names, dates, and the locations of key happenings must be scrupulously accurate. From that point on, the writer is free to invent. Thus, we enter the secret infrastructure of emergent history and the private nightmare of public policy. Tweet
Los Angeles Times
The companion book to the PBS series pays homage to America's crown jewels, and the people who fought to save them. Tweet
Christine Muhlke, New York Times
In 1950, the editor Judith Jones rescued Anne Frank’s diary from the reject pile. Ten years later, she championed a cookbook no other publisher would touch and named it “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” the first of many seminal culinary titles that she shepherded. At 85, she still works as a senior editor and vice president of Knopf. But every girl needs a hobby. So three years ago, she started raising cattle. Tweet
Jessa Crispin, The Smart Set
It's criminal how much some people love books. Tweet
Deborah Orr, Guardian
'Make them pay more for the higher education of their children," says the Confederation of British Industry. "Should they really be getting child benefit?" muse policy wonks of all stripes. The poor creatures. Only Gordon Brown is their nominally leftist friend. Who are they? The middle classes, of course. But who, seriously, are the middle classes? And why are they, alone among British people, routinely referred to in the mainstream political discourse as "a class". Tweet
Matt Gross, New York Times
“Mixing things just becomes part of everyday life,” said Todd Wong, a Vancouver arts advocate who during Chinese New Year hosts the annual Gung Haggis Fat Choy dinner, where Scottish haggis finds its way into dim sum dumplings. “It’s not ‘Why are they doing this?’ It’s ‘Why not?’ ” Tweet
William M. Chace, The American Scholar
How it happened and what could be done to reverse it. Tweet
Matt Jones, Future Metro
The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet. Tweet
Justin Hyde, 3:AM Magazine Tweet
Patricia Cohen, New York Times
With entries on the porn star Linda Lovelace, the indie film “Wild Style” and Hurricane Katrina, it is clear that “A New Literary History of America” is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology. Although it has many features of an academic compendium — page numbers that reach into four digits and scores of scholarly contributors — this new collection of essays, being released on Wednesday, roams far beyond any standard definition of literature. Aside from compositions that contain the written word, its subjects include war memorials, jazz, museums, comic strips, film, radio, musicals, skyscrapers, cybernetics and photography. Tweet
Dwight Garner, New York Times
From the sorry final years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, which ended at his death in 1982, to the arrival of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, the Soviet Union seemed to be led, as David Remnick has put it, by a series of “half-dead men in half-lit hospitals.” Tweet
Barry Goldensohn, Slate Magazine Tweet
Frank Bruni, The Atlantic
On the week after I stopped visiting restaurants for the sake of reviews, I had roast chicken four nights in a row. Tweet
Laura Miller, Salon
You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture. Tweet
Michael Lind, Salon
I was once a young neoconservative. The word meant something different then, before it was hijacked by extremists. Tweet
David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
A look back, from middle age, on a man's life in a sequence of poems. Tweet
William Dalrymple, Financial Times
Like many other authors, my books used to be launched with a simple drinks party – the usual plastic-cups-and-a-couple-of-speeches affair, somewhere at the back of Holland Park. These days, however, there has been a radical change in the way books are launched. Behind this lies the striking growth of the whole global literary festival bandwagon. Tweet
Steve Silberman, Wired
The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. Tweet
Judith Shulevitz, Slate Magazine
The mystery of William Trevor's nostalgia. Tweet
Wendell Berry, New Yorker Tweet
Marisa Silver, New Yorker
Vivian and Shelly lived in downtown Los Angeles, in an industrial space that belonged, nominally, to a ribbon factory, whose warehouse was attached. Shelly had discovered it one night when the band she belonged to then had played at an impromptu concert there. When the evening was over and everyone had cleared out, Shelly and a man she’d met that evening stayed on. The man left soon afterward, but Shelly did not. She worked out an arrangement with the owner of the ribbon factory: the rent would be paid in cash, and if Shelly was discovered by the housing authorities the owner would claim that she was a squatter. Tweet
Michael Specter, New Yorker
Where will synthetic biology lead us? Tweet
David Mason, New Yorker Tweet
Sara Corbett, New York Times
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again. Tweet
Carolyn Y. Johnson, Boston Globe
At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy. Tweet
Andrew O'Hagan, New York Review Of Books
Britain is a very changed country; it has changed morally. It might be said that its people's sense of what life is all about has altered more in the last fifty years than it did in the previous 250, beginning in 1709, when Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield. Yet one of the things that hasn't changed is the popularity of the nation's most popular word: "nice." When I was growing up, everything worth commenting on could probably be described either as "nice" or, controversially, "not nice." My mother would invite me downstairs for a "nice cup of tea" before I went off to school to be taught lessons by "that nice teacher of yours." At the same time, Prime Minister Edward Heath, who had "a nice smile," was "not being nice to the unions." Tony Blair seemed "very nice" at first, but he wasn't very nice to his friend Gordon Brown. "Nice try," my old headmaster would say if he read this very paragraph, "but your diction could be nicer." Tweet
Sally Sampson, Washington Post
I am sick of reading about how the obesity epidemic is being fueled by fast food. I can't stand that poor people are eating it because they think it's their only option. And I am sad that Ben, my otherwise endearing teenage son, squanders his allowance on pizza and burgers, both of which make him feel rotten. I've always known that fast food is inferior in flavor and nutrition to its home-cooked counterpart, but I also suspected it couldn't really be as cheap as people think it is.
So I sought proof. Tweet
Seth Mydans, New York Times
It is the dress, she said, that catches the eye, the long silk sheath with the slits in the sides that offers what she calls “a startling panorama of the entire landscape of the female form.”
The dress is called a cheongsam, and the woman wearing it is Catherine Lim, 67, arguably the most vivid personality in strait-laced Singapore and, when she is not writing witty romantic novels or telling ghost stories, one of the government’s most acute critics. Tweet
Jerry Weinberger, City Journal
The U.S. has revolutionized its culinary culture over the last 40-odd years. No longer is it the developed world’s worst food nation; in fact, it’s perhaps the best. And it’s largely thanks to the (currently disputed) genius of America’s entrepreneurial capitalism. Tweet
Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune
Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does! Tweet
Emily Nussbaum, New York
Neil Patrick Harris used to be an underage doctor on TV. Now he’s another Hollywood first: an out gay actor who can host award shows, play a womanizer, walk the red carpet with his boyfriend, and then get cast in movies as a straight dad. Neat trick. Tweet
Greg Critser, Scientific Blogging
I recently attended the International Developmental Biological Congress in sunny Edinburgh, Scotland. Here is my diary. Tweet
Dwight Garner, New York Times
In “Keynes: Return of the Master,” Mr. Skidelsky surveys the vast body of Keynes’s work. But he boils the thinking down to a few essential points. Central among them is that market economies are fundamentally uncertain; large shocks like the recent meltdown are not anomalies but normal if unpredictable events. Government should intervene in a crisis — as the Obama administration has since the fall of Lehman Brothers last year — supplying a judicious but firm hand on the tiller. Tweet
Danny Heitman, Christian Science Monitor
David Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker whose interests include global ecology, has examined numerous communities across America and discovered one that strikes him as a model of environmental efficiency. That community is New York City, and in Green Metropolis, his latest book, Owen tells readers what green-conscious citizens can learn from Gotham’s example. Tweet
Ben H. Winters, Slate Magazine
How I wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Tweet
Amanda Fortini, Salon
Jennifer Aniston's movies are middling. Her talent is questionable. Why can't we get enough of her? Tweet
Paul Bloom, New York Times
We shouldn’t underestimate the short-term self. Sometimes the long-term self should stay out of its way. Tweet
Halil Arda, New Humanist
Muslim creationist, cult leader, Dawkins' nemesis, messiah. Tweet
Olivia Judson, New York Times
Several times this summer, science journalists in London have leaned over to me and said something along the lines of, “I was thinking of writing,” and gone on to describe an article that was going to be critical of someone. “But then,” the speaker would gloomily conclude, “I thought to myself, ‘Simon Singh,’ and I decided not to.” Tweet
Paul Simms, New Yorker
We are on our way to your planet. We will be there shortly. But in this, our first contact with you, our “headline” is: We do not want your gravel. Tweet
Anne Mendelson, Los Angeles Times
The culinary tag "Southeast Asian" has cachet in American foodie circles even though it has not yet achieved the all-purpose buzzword status of "Mediterranean" (though I seem to recall that someone has invented a "Southeast Asian turkey burger"). Books about the food of this vast and complex region are multiplying fast. Tweet
Ray Mears, Guardian
There are places on earth so vast they impress upon us the power of nature, and Canada is one of them. It boasts a seemingly endless list of superlatives – it sprawls over almost 10m square kilometres, making it the second-largest country in the world after Russia; it has more than two million lakes, amounting to about a tenth of the world's fresh water; and embraces the longest coastline of any country. There's a vastness to this country that is almost unimaginable – an epic grandeur to its landscapes, its forests, rivers, ice and snow, its mountains, wildlife and wilderness. No matter how many times I travel here, I'm always staggered by its sheer scale. Tweet
Judith Monachina, Boston Globe
There were true believers and maybe a few skeptics too when the group of high school students announced two years ago that they wanted to plant a garden and feed their school. Kathy Sullivan’s attitude was probably somewhere between enthusiasm and doubt. But Sullivan had more at stake than most. As Food Service director here, her job suddenly became more complicated. Tweet
David Brooks, New York Times
Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within. Tweet
William Saletan, Slate Magazine
The disappearing boundaries of cigarette prohibition. Tweet
David Byrne, Wall Street Journal
Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis. Tweet
Sam Kean, 3 Quarks Daily
Watching the legions of Michael Jackson fans make pilgrimages to and build cairns of flowers and stuffed toys at the Neverland Ranch in southern California, I can’t say I shared their sorrow exactly. I did sympathize: Boy, had I been there. When David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his own southern California home on September 12, 2008—that’s the closest I’ve ever been to crying over the death of someone I didn’t know. What roiled my emotions all the more was the now-too-late conviction that I’d betrayed Wallace. Tweet
W.S. Di Piero, Slate Magazine Tweet
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
The flood referred to by the title of Margaret Atwood’s new novel isn’t the biblical deluge, sent by God to wipe out wickedness and sin, but a waterless one: an uncommon pandemic that cannot be contained by “biotools and bleach,” and that sweeps “through the air as if on wings,” burning “through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery.” This flood has killed millions upon millions, and electrical, digital and industrial systems are failing, as their human keepers die. Tweet
Nicholas Wade, New York Times
The Y chromosome has an Achilles’ heel that leads to a wide variety of sexual disorders. Tweet
Lisa Moore, The Walrus
Here’s what happens when you turn forty-five. You realize you will only ever read so many books — how much time have you got left for reading? — and you had better only read the good ones. There are only so many movies, so many trips, so many new friends, so many family barbecues with the sun going down over the long grass. It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it. Tweet
Deborah Campbell, The Walrus
Can Al Jazeera English cure what ails North American journalism? Tweet
Alfie Kohn, New York Times
More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn’t enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said — for who they are, not for what they do.
As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. Tweet
Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation
Is the conservative movement dead? In November, when many of its leading intellectuals publicly abandoned the McCain-Palin ticket, deserting their comrades and going over to the other side, the movement suffered not only electoral defeat but ideological apostasy. Tweet
Benjamin Carlson, The Atlantic
The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man. Tweet
Carol Iaciofano, Boston Globe
Not since the early days of personal computers have there been such riveting and quirky tales of “pioneers and innovators,’’ those men and women able to consider the possibilities of daily life in remarkable new ways. Tweet
James Parker, Boston Globe
For the lover of produce in New England, the countdown to fall is a gilded time. Appetite sharpens. The carrot itches in the cooling earth. The feverish fruits of summer recede - the tomatoes, the peppers, the zucchini - and the cauliflower shows once again her enigmatic face. Seasonal dishes recommend themselves; the climate solicits a culinary tribute. So what’ll it be - a pumpkin and chestnut soup? A wild mushroom risotto, with persimmon chutney?
Or perhaps... some nice Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli? Tweet
Sam Shepard, New Yorker Tweet
Tracy K. Smith, New Yorker
I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil
Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth. Tweet
Paula Bohince, New Yorker Tweet
Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
You'd think the song might be within my grasp, but I have discovered there is an enormous difference between writing the sorts of things I write and writing a song, especially the part involving having deep human feelings that rhyme. Tweet
Booth Moore, Los Angeles Times
The Internet is bringing high fashion to the masses, and the recession is making retailers and designers put the consumer first, not the brand. Tweet
Dick Cavett, New York Times
We were living in an ice-house that winter.
(That sentence is not about a power failure, but is the result of my favorite high school English teacher in Nebraska, Esther Montgomery, who advocated trying for an arresting opening sentence in writing a story. I hope you are arrested.) Tweet
Marianne Leone, Boston Globe
My new plan is to enlist the younger nieces and nephews in a skills-exchange program. They hook up my new copier/printer/particle collider and in return I use my culinary crone expertise to make them my mother’s mouth-watering lasagna. And I promise not to look at them smugly when they ask for the recipe. Tweet
Anthony Gottlieb, Intelligent Life
The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Tweet
Dominique Browning, New York Times
We live in noise. The world is a booming, rustling, buzzing place to begin with (though many of us have shut out nature’s clamor), and to that we have added every conceivable vibration of our own making and every possible means of assault, whether it’s the vast, thrumming climate-controlling systems of our sealed buildings or the tiny earbuds nestled against our cochleae. What chance does quiet have against all this? Tweet
Jonathan Lethem, New York Times
By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired), yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Tweet
Patricia Cohen, New York Times
Nicholas Thompson is not bragging when he says that his new book about the two master builders of America’s cold war strategy, Paul Nitze and George Kennan, could have been written only by him. Tweet
Frank Furedi, The Australian
ONE of the most influential contemporary cultural myths is that our era is characterised by the end of deference. Tweet
Judith Warner, New York Times
I am back, once again this week, to mortality, aging, time’s passage, loss. Tweet
Josh Olson, Village Voice
I will not read your fucking script.
That's simple enough, isn't it? "I will not read your fucking script." What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever. Tweet
Lee Kovarsky, Salon
Fighting the death penalty should not hinge on proving that innocent people have been sentenced to die. Tweet
Jack Henry, 3:AM Magazine
an old man walks
between the shadows
of his footfalls,
between the sound
of light overtaking dark
and the diminishing returns
of time Tweet
Alison Flood, Guardian
Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies, whether it's Sebastian Faulks taking on James Bond in Devil May Care last year, or the bucketloads of Virginia Andrews novels she has "written" since her death more than 20 years ago. Tweet
Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic
Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now. Tweet
Michael Pollan, New York Times
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. Tweet
Ron Rosenbaum, Slate
It's time to retire the term. Tweet
Lee Drutman, Miller-McCune
A new book by W. Brian Arthur, a pioneer in the area of positive feedback in economics, argues that genius is overrated and technology drives its own innovations. Tweet
Laura Miller, Salon
At a time when Americans are wallowing in consumer debt, let's reconsider the joys of penny pinching. Tweet
Louisa Gilder, New York Times
This biography is a gift. It is both wonderfully written (certainly not a given in the category Accessible Biographies of Mathematical Physicists) and a thought-provoking meditation on human achievement, limitations and the relations between the two. Here we find a man with an almost miraculous apprehension of the structure of the physical world, coupled with gentle incomprehension of that less logical, messier world, the world of other people. Tweet
Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, New York Times
What follows is a guide to help you get started -- whether you are in elementary school, graduate school, in between or beyond. Think of it as an emergency first step to improve American handwriting. Tweet
Samantha Storey, New York Times
It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes — obentos as the Japanese call them — increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too. Tweet
Jane Hirshfield, Slate Magazine Tweet
Simon Hattenstone, Guardian
Why I love my coffee-shop loyalty card. Tweet
Charlotte Higgins, Guardian
The real question, then, is not why these artists chose to leave, but why they have stayed away. Tweet
My-Thuan Tran, Los Angeles Times
The enclave is home to five papers catering to Vietnamese Americans' interests - and one of them just started up this summer. Despite the economy, all are doing well. Tweet
Carl Zimmer, New York Times
Long after Darwin’s death in 1882, the history of flowers continued to vex scientists. But talk to experts today, and there is a note of guarded optimism. Tweet
Colin Fernandes, New York Times
Still, after a demoralizing recent constellation of patients, I was left wondering which is worse: informing people that they are going to die, or that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives in pain. Tweet
Paul Theroux, New Yorker
Even in his best days in Medford, running the family clothing store, Altman had always imagined that he would return to Africa, to the Lower River. It had been his Eden, for those four years he had spent in a village called Malabo as a young man. Now, after nearly forty years, he was on his way back. The decades in between seemed almost a digression: the business, the marriage, the children. Altman’s Store for Men had closed, the marriage had failed, Altman’s children were grown, absent, living their lives. A little over sixty, he was alone again. He had enough money to see him into his old age, yet he wanted more than that. No one needed him in Medford, and he wondered if the people of Malabo might still remember what he had done there. Tweet
Justin Quinn, New Yorker
I carry America into these young heads,
at least some parts that haven’t yet got there—
Hawthorne’s Salem, Ellison’s blacks and reds,
Bishop’s lovely lines of late summer air. Tweet
Tom Sleigh, New Yorker Tweet
James Schuyler, New Yorker Tweet
Judith Thurman, New Yorker
Amelia Earhart’s flight. Tweet
Alexis Mainland, New York Times
Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read. Tweet
Jon Michael Varese, Guardian
The great Victorian is probably even more ubiquitous now than he was in his lifetime. How he remains such vital reading is an intriguing question. Tweet
Alessandra Stanley, New York Times
It’s an odd bit of a role reversal: Ms. Couric is a morning-show natural who had to tone down her peppy cadence and casual style to suit the formality of evening news programs, while Ms. Sawyer, born to be an evening anchor, spent much of her career twisting her natural elegance into the shape of slap-happy morning television. And Mr. Williams, who ascended to the position of NBC anchor on the shoulders of an old boys’ club, now has to reposition himself as a member of a persecuted minority, the white male anchorman. Tweet
Jonah Lehrer, The Atlantic
When my wife looks at me in frustration after yet another crappy fast food meal consumed in the parking lot of a rest stop, here's what I'm going to say: vacation has important psychological benefits. This tedious drive is necessary - not for me, but for my brain. Tweet
Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times
Of the roughly 160 homes on Prouts Neck, a very private parcel of land that juts into the sea south of Scarborough, a handful are new or newly restored. But one of the houses tucked up close to the road stands out for its almost perfect condition. It is painted a dark green, and the trim is a deep red. Unlike most others along the sea there, it is relatively small, though it has a second-story balcony that offers a pristine view of the ocean across a manicured, if simple, lawn and the jagged rocks that hug the coast. Tweet
Douglas Rushkoff, Edge
We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. Tweet
Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times
Disasters, for Solnit, do not merely put us in view of apocalypse, but provide glimpses of utopia. They do not merely destroy, but create. “Disasters are extraordinarily generative,” she writes. As the prevailing order — which she elliptically characterizes as advanced global capitalism, full of anomie and isolation — collapses, another order takes shape: “In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society.” Tweet
Anjana Ahuja, The Times
Thank the Lord for creationists. Without their blinkered belief in the biblical account of how life came to be, Richard Dawkins would never have felt the need to give us The Greatest Show on Earth. And what a fine, lucid and convincing exhibition he puts on, walking us through the natural world to demonstrate that evolution by natural selection is everywhere. Tweet
Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
His new book, 'The Anthologist,' is a novel within an novel featuring a character who sheds light on his creator. Tweet
Ada Calhoun, New York
Why the niche will never triumph, and mass culture will always march on. Tweet
Stewart Bourn, 3:AM Magazine Tweet
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
At the end of his deeply affecting memoir, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes about his grandson “Little Teddy” — the son of his son “Medium Teddy” who delivered such a heartbreaking eulogy at the senator’s funeral on Saturday — and his difficulties mastering the family tradition of sailing. The senator told the 10-year-old “we might not be the best,” but “we can work harder than anyone,” and Little Teddy stayed with it, grew eager to learn and started winning races. That, the senator writes, “is the greatest lesson anyone can learn”: that if you “stick with it,” that if, as the title of his book suggests, you keep a “true compass” and do your best, you will eventually “get there.”
And that, in a sense, is the theme of this heartfelt autobiography: that persistence, perseverance and patience in pursuit of a cause or atonement for one’s failures can lead to achievement and the possibility of redemption. It’s the story of how this youngest and most underestimated of siblings slowly, painfully, incrementally found genuine purpose of his own in shouldering the weighty burden of familial expectations and the duty of carrying on his slain brothers’ work. Tweet
Daniel Gross, Slate Magazine
Better enjoy that vanilla cupcake with espresso-ganache icing today, because the cupcake crash is coming! Tweet
David Ferry, Three Penny Tweet
Jon Mooallem, New York Times
The down economy has clearly created circumstances in which some people desperately need to rent storage units — namely, people losing their homes. But more significantly, it seems to be upsetting a longstanding equilibrium — a kind of psycho-financial inertia that has kept so many tenants in place. Tweet
Hany Farid, IEEE Spectrum
Doctoring digital photos is easy. Detecting it can be hard. Tweet
Simon Garfield, Guardian
Ikea is changing its font to Verdana - causing outrage among typomaniacs. Should the rest of us care? Absolutely. Tweet
Saki Knafo, New York Times
“Where the Wild Things Are,” in other words, cost about as much to make as did “Shrek” and “Madagascar,” and yet in almost every other way it represents a sharp departure from those family-friendly blockbusters. Tweet
David Ross, Los Angeles Times
Duck confit, pancetta-wrapped quail, butter-poached lobster tails, fried zucchini blossoms -- not exactly how most collegians are expecting to dine when they head back to their school dormitories this fall. But those are some of the dishes that may again delight the denizens of Norris Hall at Occidental College in Eagle Rock come this semester.
Occidental junior Saul Sutcher is heading back to school with his '87 Volvo packed full of his cooking equipment and dishes. Without objection from the school administration, he'll again be setting up for Café Norris, preparing three-course gourmet meals served in the dormitory's common room most Saturday nights. Tweet
Jacqueline Maybin, Guardian
The uterus, or womb, is the organ par excellence. It functions so efficiently that a full understanding of its processes may lead to novel treatments for a plethora of medical disorders. Tweet
Stephen Fry, Guardian
Let us never stop talking about the creatures we share the planet with. The first step is to know them a little better. Tweet
Zsuzsi Gartner, The Walrus
Field notes on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original. Tweet
Mary Jo Bang, The Walrus Tweet
Lawrence M. Krauss, New York Times
Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again? Tweet
Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine
The unexpected pleasures of George Herbert's sentences. Tweet
Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times
Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles: one for book nerds, one for rock geeks. At the intersection, you’ll find a lot of opinionated people with glasses, having arguments about the exact point in time when a particular author or musician ceased to be cool. You’ll find paychecks cashed and spent entirely at bookstores or record shops on the same day. You’ll find a great deal of love and devotion, and you’ll find the slim, pocket-sized volumes that make up Continuum’s album-oriented 33 1/3 imprint. Tweet
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
How did the well-to-do scions of one of New York’s oldest families come to such a sad and ludicrous end? The story is a kind of male, New York City version of “Grey Gardens,” and it has fascinated writers for years. It reportedly inspired Marcia Davenport’s 1954 novel, “My Brother’s Keeper,” and Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “The Dazzle,” and now Mr. Doctorow, using his patented blend of fact and fiction, has tackled it here, producing a slight, unsatisfying, Poe-like story that turns out to be a study in morbid psychology. Tweet
Caleb Crain, New Yorker
What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts? Tweet
Robert McCrum, Guardian
Seventy years have gone by since the Second World War began and 64 since it ended. That dwindling minority of Britons, some 3 million, who lived through those six extraordinary years remember them as the most vivid moment in their lives and still refer to "the last war". So do the 11 million baby boomers and the 20 million over 60. Even some of their grandchildren will articulate this instinctive reflex. Britain has fought in some dozen wars and "emergencies" since 1945, but it's the Second World War that casts the longest shadow. As the D-Day anniversary celebrations indicate, this is one war that has not gone away. Tweet
Michael J. Mooney, SF Weekly
Heretics, nonbelievers, and doubters worship the Amazing Randi. So what will free thinkers do when he’s gone? Tweet
Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times
In pandemics throughout history, someone got the blame. Tweet
Jan Swafford, Slate
How A Pause Can Be The Most Devastating Effect In Music. Tweet
David Denby, Guardian
How does snark operate these days? Let me count the ways. Tweet
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