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by Garrison Keillor, Salon
Dishonesty has gutted the last patriotic holiday that means something.
by Charles Stuart Platkin, Seattle Times
Have you ever tried dried cherries? Wow, are they good.
by Diane Solway, Internationa Herald Tribune
Dancers call their ability to remember a wide range of steps, roles and styles, muscle memory. And while it obviously manifests itself physically as far as dance is concerned, what actually happens, according to neuroscientists, is that the movements become thoroughly mapped in the brain, creating a shorthand between thinking and doing.
by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
The results are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary procsses that began in other species.
by David Kamp, New York Times
I came to realization that America is in the grips of a nefarious chicken-finger pandemic, in which a blandly tasty foodstuff has somehow the de facto official nibble of our young.
by Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times
Intermissions are a rare time when classical musicians can be heard improvising together.
by Saritha Rai, New York Times
In India, where many traditions are being rapidly overturned as a result of globalization, the practice of eating a home-cooked meal for lunch lives on.
To achieve that in this sprawling urban amalgamation of an estimated 25 million people, where long commutes by train and bus are routine, Mumbai residents rely on an intricately organized, labor-intensive operation that puts some automated high-tech systems to shame. It manages to deliver tens of thousands of meals to workplaces all over the city with near-clockwork precision.
by Stevenson Swanson, Chiacgo Tribune
The baritone voice on 30 years of NPR newscasts does a mean Birtney Spears. Sort of.
by Richard Siklos, New York Times
3-D is clearly coming into its own, and its cinematic aspect is just one element of technology's broader march toward a new era of make-believe super-realism.
by Laura Van Prooyen, Slate
by Marvin Bell, New Yorker
by Elizabeth Macklin, New Yorker
by David Baker, New Yorker
by William Trevor, New Yorker
by David Rieff, VQR
In thinking of my mother now, more than a year after her death, I often find myself dwelling on that startling phrase in Auden's great memorial poem for Yeats—words that both sum up what small immortality artistic accomplishment sometimes can confer and are, simultaneously, such an extraordinary euphemism for extinction. Once dead, Yeats, Auden writes, "became his admirers."
by David Lansing, Los Angeles Times
High-end restaurants are rethinking bottled water, opting instead for the stuff with a distinctly local terroir.
by Phuong Ly, Washington Post
Ruth Lubic defied doctors to change the way American women give birth. After more than four decades, her work isn't close to being finished.
by Paul Vitello, New York Times
"Ugly" behavior in tourists is almost always in the eye of the people being toured; and Americans are no longer the only, or even the dominant group of toruists out in the world.
by Ann Hulbert, New York Times
School transformation can't be engineered by any test, which is two-dimensional tool at best. Still, a good national exam would spread well-fcused standards across state borders and spur progress.
by Stven Pinker, New York Times
Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never red Virginia Woolf will insouciantly bast of their ignorance of basic physics.
The costs of an ignorance of science are not just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures and a unilateral disarmament in national compettiveness. There is a moral cost as well.
by Lee Smolin, New York Review Of Books
Why more books on Albert Einstein?
by Sam Jordison, The Guardian
I've spent months working to reach this point, but finishing my book is a strangely ambivalent experience.
by Christopher Shea, Columbia Journalism Review
How did ethics become a staple of contemporary food writing?
by Adam Roberts, Amateur Gourmet
I think I'll stick to burritos in Park Slope.
by Garrison Keillor, Salon
When it first strikes you that your book isn't going to be the next "Huck Finn," don't wallow in despair. Take a long walk.
by Bonny Wolf, Washington Post
I feel your pain. You pull out the cookbook stuffed with recipes torn from the newspaper and the backs of boxes, go to the spot where you know you tucked your favorite lavender lemon cake recipe, written on a scrap of brown paper bag. And it's gone.
by E. J. Dionne Jr, Washington Post
Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president — fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a canddiate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.
by Mark Bittman, New York Times
I'm sure you know how to make a burger. But do you make a burger you love, one that people notice, one that draws raves?
by Charles McGrath, New York Times
Pete Jordan washes dishes across the country in his new book, "Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States."
by Shea Stadium, Slate
by Benedict Carey, New York Times
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find.
by Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times
A little-known Nazi spy mission during the Battle of the Bulge inspires 'Twin Peaks' co-creator Mark Frost to emulate the World War II thrillers of yore.
by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.
by Jean Valentine, New Yorker
by George Saunders, New Yorker
by Chris Colin, San Francisco Chronicle
Two mysteries have followed me well into adulthood: Does soaping yourself work underwater, and how come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working? Having pitched a work, and not a soap, column, I recently attempted to answer the latter.
by Julian Gough, Prospect Magazine
The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is superior to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages, western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh.
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
In the race for president, do the little people still matter?
by Claudia La Rocco, New York Times
A new generation of choreographers confronts a bias where thin is eternally in.
by Ruth La Ferla, New York Times
Paul Reubens remains the hero of legions of post-adolescents and their parents, who recall him as a shrewd merchant of anticonformity.
by Kaushik Basu, Scientific American
When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reaward — an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning.
by Steffie Nelson, Los Angeles Times
A book club that meets at actor Adrian Grenier's house is spurred into a night of 'fundraging' by Jeffrey Sachs' 'The End of Poverty.'
by Motoko RIch, New York Times
For all those who believe that "Moby Dick" would be great except for the parts about the whale, the Britis publisher Orion Books will publish this month a set of pared-down classics.
It's a well-trodden path, from Reader's Digest to CliffNotes to "Shrink Lit," and has sparked the inevitable tsktsk-ing in literary circles.
But surely, there are some books that could use some trimming.
by Abigail Zuger, New York Times
Some doctors turned writers want to dispel the notion of medical magic, some offer social critique and some should keep their day jobs.
by David Grossman, The Guardian
Living in a war zone, Israeli writer David Grossman turned away from recording the conflict in his work. But after his son was killed in the army, he found it was the only way to come to terms with his grief.
by Gendy Alimurung, LA Weekly
Inside the indie booksellers.
by Stehanie Rosenbloom, New York Times
In New York City, in many (if not most) adult courses, the women are numerous and the men are few — for approximately the same reason that men behind the wheel don't ask for directions.
by Cathy Horyn, New York Times
At the start of any fashion writer's career there is, waiting at the end, the dreaded article about older women and how they can nver find clothes appropriate for their age. I swore on a stack of Vogues I would never write such a piece. It was totem journalism, predictable, worked at. Even the term "appropriate" has always seemed to me old hat, with violets on top.
So what changed?
by Alison Stein Wellner, New York Magazine
The late-night pitchman who makes millions preying on the simple desire to live a less anxious life.
by Julia Wallace, Salon
From munching parties to Slim-Fast to Atkins, we've spent centuries trying to lose weight — despite all the evidence that diets don't work.
by Bob Thompson, Washington Post
No, no, Jonathan Lethem concedes, he's not really in favor of plagiarism. At least not the deceptive, thieving kind.
But he does want to spark an argument that will "explode the word."
by Michael Ryan, New Yorker
by Anthony Gottlieb, New Yorker
Why do they hate Him?
by Nadine Gordimer, New Yorker
by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post
As ppular as spelling bees have become, academic researchers say many schools are giving spelling short shrift.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
It's taken 12 years, three authors and one rejected manuscript, but tomorrow will be another day when "Rhett Butler's People," the second sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," is published this fall.
by Paula Bohince, Slate
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
They are getting ready to see the universe born again.
Again and again and again — 30 million times a second, in fact.
by Randy Kennedy, New York Times
Wormholes in perception, vortexes in viewing.
by Justin Peters, Salon
Coldstone Creamery and other "mix-in" ice cream chains that lard their cones with cakes and candies make me long for a simple, soft-serve swirl.
by Steve Paulson, Salon
The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.
by Clive Thompson, New York Times
His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd.
by Jack Shafer, Slate
Newspaper journalists hate working weekends, so they keep a vigil all week for a special kind of crap that they can write upon Friday nad bank for publicaton on Monday.
by Christina Hoff Sommers, Weekly Standard
And the fecklessness of American feminism.
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
Behind all this stellar news is another headline: We are in the golden age of telescopes.
by Shira Boss, New York Times
"It's an accidental profession, most of the time," said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. "If you had the key, you'd be very welathy. Nobody has the key."
by Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times
A war of words breaks out between print and internet writers as newspapers cut back coverage.
by Pam Belluck, New York Times
The devastation leaves Greensburg, population 1,500, shadowed by a colossal question mark: When a thriving community cataclysmically finds itself reduced to rubble, how can it put itself back together?
by Robin McKie, The Observer
What constitutes a good science book as opposed to a mere bestseller, such as Stephen Hawking's famously unread work, A Brief History of Time?
by Alberto Fuguet, Washington Post
Look, Ma, no translator! A Chilean writer tries his hand at accent-free prose.
by Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
Poetry appeals to people who get bored esily. It can accomplish a lot in small spaces: sometimes, in almost no time at all.
by Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Among its other virtues, American Food Writing— a smorgasbord of essays, memoirs, scenes from fiction and even the occasional recipe — traces our gradual progress toward a "kitchen without walls."
by Jodi Kantor, New York Times
The late, great writer Marjorie Williams once confesed that reading "Fast Food Nation," Eric Schlosser's investigation into the fast-food industry, left her craving a Burger King fix. I had a similar reaction to "One Perfect Day," Rebecca Mead's dour tour of the American wedding business, which made me suddenly long for a frilly Saturday night nuptial blowout.
by Mark Atwood Lawrence, New York Times
Visionaries or cynics? Peacemakers or warmongers? Few individuals in recent times have provoked as much controversy as Richard Nixon and his partner in foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger.
by A. O. Scott, New York Times
As a tourist destination, Hollywood is a bit of a tease, at once wide-open and hermetic. Its all around you — the magic of the movies, the homes of the stars, the big sign in the hills — but where, exactly, is it?
by Thomas Jones, London Review Of Books
There is a wearisome machismo inherent in much of the iconography of typewriting.
by Richard Horton, New York Review Of Books
A doctor's mistakes are perhaps best seen as signs of a mind at work. The patient and doctor together share a common purpose in getting this mind thinking straight.
by Letters To An Unknown Audience
This picture is a picture of my whole life, in 8 1/2 x 11.
by Andrew Brown, Salon
Thanks to George W. Bush, the man who was supposed to reinvent the Labor Party leaves offices with more friends in America than in the U.K.
by Giles Harvey, Salon
Christopher Hitchens has attacked modern-day saints like Mother Teresa and Princess Di, but his new book takes aim at the most sacred cow of all: The Almighty.
by Harold McGee, New York Times
It's not surprising that food dropped onto bacteria would collect some bacteria. But how many? Does it collect more as the seconds tick by? Enough to make you sick?
Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.
by Erica Levy McAlpine, Slate
by Robert McCrum, The Guardian
You might not think it from this publicity, but most literary endeavour ends not in prizes, but failure.
by Erica Levy McAlpine, Slate
by Liza Mundy, Washington Post
For generations of adoptions, the birth mother was an anonymous woman who relinquished her infant and then receded into the shadows. That is so not Hava Leichtman.
by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
Byron Pitts was chatting with students at a Harlem charter school the day before a recent visit by president Bush when the CBS correspondent had a realization: They viewed him as just another empty suit who couldn't possibly understand their problems. Little did they know.
"When I was your age," he told thme, "I couldn't read."
by Walter E. Hussman Jr., Wall Street Journal
Free news for online customers is a disastrous business plan.
by Charlie Brooker, The Guardian
Book covers are increasingly designed to draw in passersby via any means necessary. Subtlety doesn't get a look-in. Nor does common sense.
by Lionel Shriver, Telegraph
Given that publishing honest and thus sometimes unfavourable assessments of the work of colleagues is violently at dds with a writer's self-interest, it's surprising that literary editors can cajole any author into reviewing. But then, plenty of writers like me don't know what's good for them, and some writers plain need the money.
by Paul Duggan, Washington Post
By the looks of hi, a rather reserved fellow, you'd expect — and you'd be wrong.
by Bruce Stutz, New York Times
When my life fell apart, I started taking an antidepressant — then got off it on my own.
by D J Taylor, Independent
Considering so many of us spend our days toiling in offices, where are the great novels of working life?
by Angust Brown, Los Angeles Times
The director-writer-star of the film 'Me and You and Everyone We Know' offers quirky takes on relationships in her new book.
by Corey Kilgannon, New York Times
There's nothing unusual about grown men gathering around wide-screen TVs to watch collisions, whether between players in cleats or on skates or between cars on a racetrack.
But a group of men viewing wide-screen monitors in a control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory the other day were rooting for very different collisions, ones made by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced rick).
by Jonathan Miles, New York Times
The rise and fall of the cigarette in American culture.
by Dave Barry, New York Times
I've become so dependent on e-mail that I sometimes wonder how we ever got by without it. Imagine, for example, how useful it would have been for Paul Revere.
by James Button, The Age
Tony Blair could have been a great British prime minister.
by Emily Gould, New York Times
Supermarket tabloids and gossip columns stil sell the illusion that stars live in a different world from the rest of us; but the internet has created a new reality, and we're all living in it together.
by Laura Barton, The Guardian
When I took out my headphones, I was startled by the noise that rushed in. Until I heard a rhythm in the shuffle of the newspapers...
by Micheline Maynard, New York Times
On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in mid-March, hundreds of food lovers packed a tent on Detroit Street in front of Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, lining up for samples to celebrate the deli's 25th anniversary.
by Will Davis, The Guardian
Once they've found their niche, most authors are content to plough the same furrow. And why not? It worked for Austen.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.
by John Horgan, The Chronicle Of Higher Education
Einstein navigated the tumult of the 20th century with extraordinary grace.
by Susan Kinzie, Washington Post
For many overachieving high school seniors, getting the rejection letter is the first real kick-in-the-gut feeling of failure. And for admissions officers who have spent month recruiting the most talented students, April can be like a bad breakup — played out thousands of times.
by Ariel Levy, New York Magazine
Is white appropriate? What's the right term for a groom who's a woman? And what to say to her mother?
by Justin Taylor, The Believer
How mysterious is a mysterious text if the author is still alive (and emailing)?
by Edward Hirsch, Slate
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