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Carol Rumens, The Guardian Tweet
W. S. Merwin, New Yorker Tweet
Ian McEwan, New Yorker Tweet
Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
Borders has gone belly-up, Amazon thrives, and doom-mongers are proclaiming the death of literature on the high street. But this could be the opening of a fine new chapter… Tweet
Lora Zarubin, Los Angeles Times
In a city where even supermarkets offer sushi, we try to make sense of our obsession. Tweet
Henry Shukman, New York Times
“I have heard rumors of visitors who were disappointed,” J. B. Priestley once said of the Grand Canyon. “The same people will be disappointed at the Day of Judgment.” Tweet
Stacy Schiff, New York Times
This meditation on the art of letter-writing embraces old friends — Flaubert, Freud, the Mitfords — and plenty of unknowns. Tweet
Darshak Sanghavi, New York Times
Michael Specter takes on those he sees as denying science, from promoters of alternative medicines to anti-vaccine zealots. Tweet
Matt Gaffney, Slate Magazine
How could two crossword constructors come up with puzzles that are almost exactly alike? Tweet
Ed Zuckerman, New York Times
The Elliott family has been professionally funny for three generations. Does it matter that audiences don’t always get the joke? Tweet
Elizabeth Olson, New York Times
Move over restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts. A new fantasy seems to have taken hold for people who long to own their own business: the cupcakery. Tweet
David Edmonds, Prospect
Armenia excels at chess. Its top player now has a shot at becoming world champion. How did this tiny country become a giant at the game? Tweet
Charles Baudelaire, translated by Will Stone, 3:AM Magazine Tweet
Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books
The picture Caldwell paints is complex, paradoxical, and sometimes at variance with the anti-immigration thrust of his argument. Tweet
Lesley Freeman Riva, The Atlantic
The day my daughter's kindergarten teacher called me into her Italian classroom to tell me my child was failing lunch, I knew I had run up against the great continental culinary divide. Tweet
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Our hunger for cookbooks. Tweet
Elyssa East, New York Times
“It’s Thanksgiving — time to put our feedbags on,” my family likes to say as we elbow for room next to the Pilgrim and Puritan ghosts the holiday summons to our table. Our colonial forebears probably would not disapprove of our having second and third helpings of sweet potatoes and stuffing, or even rushing off to watch football after the meal — the Pilgrims themselves played lots of games at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. But I imagine they would find fault with our binge for another reason: it is not accompanied by a fast. Tweet
Jane Sigal, New York Times
Sue Maden was peeling and slicing apples for the double-crusted pie she planned to take as her contribution to dinner at a friend’s house, but a worry was nagging her. “Do I have to confess that I bought the pie crusts already made and rolled up?” she asked.
Ms. Maden is just not that interested in cooking, she admitted. Yet she hosts an annual dinner party that is one of the most sought-after invitations in Jamestown, R.I., a small island town (around 5,000 people and one traffic light) in Narragansett Bay. For the last 10 years, she has held a Thanksgiving leftovers potluck on the Saturday after the holiday. Tweet
Stephen Emms, The Guardian
Out of sync with print-based reading habits, this form is nonetheless perfectly in tune with the web. Tweet
Rosanna Warren, Slate Magazine Tweet
Wayne Gooderham, The Guardian
Call me shallow (actually, please don't) but I think a good cover can be a significant component of a good read. Tweet
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Edge
Here it is then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is, formed by biology and history, genes and culture, in the midst of the contingency of the world, here one is, one doesn't know how, one doesn't know why, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is either or who or what one is either, and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it, and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it, one wants to expand one's reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that, to live one's life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep, a sweep that includes, so improbably, a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer, who, moved by powers beyond himself, did something more improbable than all the improbabilities constituting his improbable existence could have entailed, did something that won him someone else's life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn't belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of Veritas and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all. Tweet
Abigail Zuger, New York Times
When the moment came to unplug the corpse from its charger and plug in its immensely expensive replacement — executioner, stay your hand: Look who’s waking up! Tweet
Eileen Kinsella, ARTnews
Two decades after the artist’s death, the Andy Warhol brand is stronger than ever, as collectors continue to pay top prices for his work, curators study obscure aspects of his career, and consumers snap up products—from candy to condoms—plastered with his imagery. Tweet
Carol Rumens, The Guardian Tweet
Sarah Arvio, New Yorker Tweet
Philip Schultz, New Yorker Tweet
Don DeLillo, New Yorker
We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight. Tweet
James Wood, New Yorker
The novels of Paul Auster. Tweet
Tom Sietsema, Washington Post
There are countless ways customers can endear themselves to restaurants. Inviting a clown to a four-star establishment is not one of them. Tweet
Stephen King, New York Times
Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony. Tweet
Tony Perrottet, New York Times
A food-obsessed traveler uses the Zagat guide of the Napoleonic era to explore the culinary wonders of this city in the 21st century. Tweet
Stuart Andrews, PC Pro
Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, but have the authors of sci-fi stories finally run out of steam? Tweet
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Donatello was the first genius of the Renaissance, but his raw, expressive work also challenges all our assumptions about the period. He is justly the star of the V&A's triumphant new galleries. Tweet
Diana Bletter, New York Times
The temperature was soaring to 75 degrees, and I was walking on ice. Around me the Matanuska Glacier, about 100 miles from Anchorage, sparkled and shimmered in the afternoon sun. The only sound was an occasional rush of cool wind sweeping down from the towering Chugach Mountains and the crunch of my crampons as I made my way up a crevasse with a group of six other trekkers. Tweet
Daniel Gross, Slate Magazine
What a meal of beef stomach and duck throats taught me about the new China. Tweet
Amy Lifson, Humanities
Since its first publication, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ has never been out of print. It outsold every book except the Bible until Gone With the Wind came out in 1936, and resurged to the top of the list again in the 1960s. By 1900 it had been printed in thirty-six English-language editions and translated into twenty others, including Indonesian and Braille. Tweet
John Tierney, New York Times
Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise — people bound by new institutions that provide the social benefits of religion without belief in a traditional deity? Tweet
Sarah Duncan, The Guardian
As someone who works hard to get it right in my own novels, I'm very aware of just how difficult it is to depict well. Tweet
Ruth Padawer, New York Times
DNA testing has led more men to discover that their children are not biologically theirs. Families are being upended, and so is the law. Tweet
Saul Hansell, New York Times
Have I tragically underestimated the ability of foreign cellphone companies to come up with devilishly complex pricing plans and the skill of economists to convert those schemes into pat theories that can be illustrated with neat charts and graphs? Tweet
Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
I've done it lots of times. You've probably done it as well. Maybe you've even done it to me. People rarely own up to it, but it happens all time. That's why it's the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year: "unfriend." Tweet
Michael Oriard, Slate Magazine
How the NFL became the American war game. Tweet
Ellen Wehle, Slate Magazine Tweet
Wayne Gooderham, The Guardian
Nabokov didn't finish The Original of Laura, so we'll never know how good it might have been – and that's the key to its tantalising appeal. Tweet
Nicholas Wade, New York Times
New research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development. Tweet
Stuart Walton, The Guardian
No more lounging in Waterstone's or browsing in Borders – turn over an old leaf with the starchy, strait-laced booksellers of old. Tweet
Carol Rumens, Guardian
Skrief's nature poems sidestep the 'egotistical sublime' by allowing nature to speak. Tweet
Sam Shepard, New Yorker Tweet
Liz Waldner, New Yorker Tweet
James Longenbach, New Yorker Tweet
Michael Wood, London Review Of Books
Roland Barthes died almost 30 years ago, on 26 March 1980, but his works continue to engage new and old readers with remarkable consistency.
The persistence of Barthes’s reputation might seem surprising, since his writing is so varied, topical, at times wilfully ephemeral. He was suspicious of monuments – ‘tombs die too,’ he says in a fine phrase in his mourning notes – and didn’t want to be one. He wrote with amusement, and without false modesty, about his own passing ‘notoriety’. But then the surprise lasts only as long as we are not thinking very hard. Monuments may or may not endure, but they are not looked at very closely; and fragile-seeming gestures, songs, jokes, metaphors, teasing sentences, often have long lives in the intimacy of many minds. It’s easy, and usually rash, to use the word ‘unforgettable’, or even ‘memorable’, since we can forget anything. But then what we hang on to becomes all the more remarkable, and Barthes, like Cole Porter, was the author of phrases and rhythms that for some of us will not go away until we do. Tweet
Ange Mlinko, The Nation
The equivalence between English and wealth is much more than a metaphor, actually. Tweet
Laura Miller, Salon
Has the memoir become the "central form" of our culture, as Ben Yagoda insists in his breezy new consideration of the form, "Memoir: A History"? Do I detect hackles rising from coast to coast at the mere suggestion? Tweet
Robert Pinsky, New York Times
Near the outset of his copious, lively account of poker’s past and present, “Cowboys Full,” James McManus describes the game, and the qualities it demands, as characteristically American. As the American game, he says, poker combines two contrasting strands in our national character, “the risk-averse Puritan work ethic and the entrepreneur’s urge to seize the main chance.” Tweet
Joanna Briscoe, Guardian
Paul Auster has created what amounts to his own, self-referential fictional world over the years, and Invisible is packed with typical Auster tropes. This is his 13th novel, and at times he seems to be both celebrating and lightly mocking his own oeuvre. There is the oddly detached male narrator roaming New York; a random dramatic incident that alters the course of a life; ruminations on the nature of writing, language and identity; multiple narrators; stories within stories; and general intertextual gadding about. And, as ever, fragments of Auster himself seem to feature – in this case, divided into two characters. Tweet
Justin Heckert, Men's Journal
Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old son struggle to stay alive miles from shore. As night falls, with no rescue imminent, the dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together. Tweet
A. O. Scott, New York Times
Perhaps the easiest and most satisfying way to make sense of the unruly cinematic abundance of the past 10 years is to sift through it for masters and masterpieces, kicking the tires to see what has been built to last. Whatever else was going on, a handful of great filmmakers made a handful of great films, just as in other decades. Tweet
Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books
One of the rare funny moments in Philip Roth's recent novel Everyman (2006) takes place when the unnamed hero visits his parents' graves in Newark. His health has been poor, his colleagues and friends have been dying, and though he has no reason to think that his own death is imminent, he can no longer pretend to himself that he will never die. In this frame of mind, he finds himself talking to the buried bones of his parents. "I'm seventy-one, your boy is seventy-one," he tells them. In his mind, he hears his mother reply: "Good. You lived." Tweet
Simon Underdown, Guardian
The idea that Darwin is to blame for high school massacres and far-right politics is a huge intellectual mistake. Tweet
Michael Finkel, National Geographic Magazine
A more tolerant Islam is confronting extremism in the world's most populous Muslim country.
National Geographic Magazine
Anything can be made with origami—from birds and bugs to stents and space telescopes. It's just a matter of math.
Harriet Evans, Guardian
I'm fed up with seeing some of our best novelists written off as 'chick lit' – you don't see the same belittling line taken with male writers. Tweet
Alastair Harper, Guardian
As well as its other horrific innovations, this was the first occasion when those in the firing line could record their experiences. Tweet
Alison Flood, Guardian
As his publisher Jane Johnson, an author herself, puts the finishing touches to a roast chicken in the kitchen, Kim Stanley Robinson – Stan – tries to explain his new theory of time travel, worked out for his latest novel, Galileo's Dream. Tweet
John T. Edge, New York Times
This month, New Orleans is having a party for the po’ boy, the city’s signature — and some say endangered — sandwich. Tweet
Wyn Cooper, Slate Magazine Tweet
Michael Lind, Salon
The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers: Each ushered in a new American era. Tweet
Tim McKeough, The Walrus
How urban planners are turning industrial eyesores into popular public spaces. Tweet
Carol Rumens, Guardian Tweet
Yiyun Li, New Yorker
When the waitress came to take the order, she asked how Suchen was doing with the smoke. Suchen replied vaguely that all was well with her, though she had no idea what smoke the waitress was talking about. The man sitting at the next table, an elbow away—the patio was barely large enough for the six tables it held, three of them unoccupied—must have been observing the exchange; he leaned over after the waitress had left and explained that up north the wildfire was just a few miles from the state highway. Tweet
Linda Pastan, New Yorker Tweet
Dave Smith, New Yorker Tweet
Amanda Fortini, Salon
Inside the elaborate, disturbing and downright riveting world of child-beauty pageants. Tweet
Arthur Lubow, New York Times
Unlike drama and music, which also unfold in time, dance is not dictated by a written script or score. Although choreographers may sketch out a work for themselves with notes, dance is still taught primarily by one dancer to another, “body to body,” as the saying goes, the way the arts were transmitted in ancient cultures. A sculptor’s blocks of stone or a painter’s pigments are paragons of stability compared to the human clay that the choreographer molds. Tweet
James Parker, New York Times
Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I’m talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets — it’s the ’60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something’s happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what’s that sound? Tweet
Emily Parker, New York Times
Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language. Tweet
George Monbiot, Guardian
My fiercest opponents on global warming tend to be in their 60s and 70s. This offers a fascinating, if chilling, insight into human psychology. Tweet
Will Stone, 3:AM Magazine Tweet
Anthony Cummins, Guardian
What's the most depressing piece of Penguin merchandising? Notebooks featuring the classic covers of much-loved titles that cost more than the novels themselves. Tweet
Ben Macintyre, The Times
Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information. Tweet
Nathan Schneider, Obit
It was a recipe for the easiest headline ever: "Death of God Guy Dies." John T. Elson, who passed away on Sept. 7, was a journalist best known for penning the story behind Time magazine’s wildly controversial cover in April 1966, which asked, in bold red letters over a black backdrop, "Is God Dead?" The issue became one of the best selling in the magazine's history and sent American religion spiraling into an identity crisis.
Maybe now, goes the obvious punch line, Elson can tell us the answer. Tweet
Penelope Green, New York Times
Welcome to home interrupted, Leslie Williams said, opening the door to what appeared to be just the opposite: a bright TriBeCa loft with near-lapidary finishes. Tweet
Stuart Blackman, The Scientist
Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions—namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications. But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to materialize, unfulfilled predictions—of which we’re seeing more and more—can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the reputation of science itself. Tweet
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, The Atlantic
The first time my grandmother was hospitalized for the mysterious pains that would lead to her death, she had an important thing on her mind.
Summoning my Uncle Soo Kiat to the bedside of her Singapore hospital, she said, "I've made the chili paste for otah," referring to a creamy and spicy fish paste wrapped in banana leaves that was one of her many signature dishes. "The fish has been bought; the otah must be made." Tweet
Janet Maslin, New York Times
The term “denialism,” used by Mr. Specter as an all-purpose, pop-sci buzzword, is defined by him as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”
In this hotly argued yet data-filled diatribe, Mr. Specter skips past some of the easiest realms of science baiting (i.e., evolution) to address more current issues, from the ethical questions raised by genome research to the furiously fought debate over the safety of childhood vaccinations. Tweet
Olivia Judson, New York Times
There are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, from Archimedes in his bathtub, to Newton and his apple. But there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration — or lack of it — in the history of science. Tweet
Robert Gottlieb, The New York Review of Books
Your take on Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet—a two-and-a-half hour documentary opening on November 4th at New York’s Film Forum—will depend on your feelings about ballet, about Wiseman, and about the Paris Opera Ballet itself. Tweet
AL Kennedy, Guardian
I have no idea what a new writer would do now – publishers are beyond risk-averse: they are decision-averse. And we are all suffering from the lack of variety. Tweet
Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine
Why so much casual talk in Yeats' brilliant poem "Adam's Curse"? Tweet
Rachel L. Swarns, New York Times
Twice a month, President Obama’s senior policy advisers gather at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to hash out strategies for improving the health of the country’s children. Among the assistant secretaries, chiefs of staff and senior aides sits an unlikely participant: a bald, intense young man who happens to be the newest White House chef. Tweet
Julia Moskin, New York Times
Even in the age of ever-expanding recipe databases, cookbooks are still alluring. In the good ones, voice, images, recipes and food sense knit into edible autobiography. Tweet
Eric Konigsberg, New York Times
Headlines in the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion tend to function both as punch line and setup, in that order. They are the heart of the paper, and not only the first thing anybody reads, but also, unlike headlines in real newspapers all over the world, the first things to be written. Tweet
Amelia Hill, Guardian
"Chick lit" has relied for years on repetitive plot lines with heroines who agonise about their weight as they swig chardonnay, smoke cigarettes and have sex with their boss. But the latest publishing phenomenon to sweep America, which has just arrived over here, features a new heroine: the young woman who is seriously overweight – and doesn't care. Tweet
Charlie Higson, Guardian
Stephen King didn't scare me when I first started reading adult horror fiction as a teenager – it was Orwell's 1984 that really frightened me. Tweet
Stephen King, New Yorker
They’ve been married for ten years and for a long time everything was O.K.—swell—but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray thinks, like a dog track. When they argue, they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don’t see it. You see the rabbit. Tweet
Katie Ford, New Yorker Tweet
Glyn Maxwell, New Yorker Tweet
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Nation
History is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. Tweet
Terri Colby, Los Angeles Times
Holly Golightly kept me company -- courtesy of Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" -- on my latest trip to Manhattan. It was an excursion that combined my passion for books with my love of travel. Tweet
Carey Winfrey, New York Times
Presidents have long been saluted, but they began returning salutes relatively recently. Tweet
Karen Houppert, Washington Post
Her college feminism professor taught her to learn through rigorous inquiry. Then Marcia Carlisle died and left her former student to answer the biggest question yet. Tweet
Pico Iyer, World Hum
Really, I suppose, the ideal traveler, or travel companion, offers a happy blend of steadiness and surprise. I make up such lists of characteristics often, in my head, and scroll quickly through some of the obvious suspects (Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Annie Dillard). And then, somehow, I alight, over and over, on a man who seems to be wearing a silk dressing gown and is best known for his novels (though in his lifetime he was celebrated as a dramatist). We read “Of Human Bondage,” “The Razor’s Edge” or “The Moon and Sixpence” for their familiar characters, their unembarrassed intensity and, perhaps, behind all that, their exotic scenes; but the reason Somerset Maugham is still commanding readers almost 50 years after his death, and the reason Hollywood keeps turning to him for new movies (“Up at the Villa,” “Being Julia,” “The Painted Veil”) is that he was a classic traveler, disguising his hunger for romance, and even for transcendence, behind the cool demeanor of an unillusioned, above-it-all, often feline Englishman. Tweet
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