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by Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times
British architecture, so often talked about as one of our biggest cultural success stories, is dull, corporate and profoundly uninspired.
by Steve Rushin, Time
Depending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty expert Nick Wreden, whose post-office branch you might want to avoid).
The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers. Poor suckers, mostly.
by Matt Snyders, City Pages
A rare disorder left him deaf, blind, and quadriplegic. Then the county took away his voice.
by Philip Weiss, New York Magazine
He hides, but craves attention. He is prurient and prudish, powerful and paranoid, an icon of the right who seems obsessed with makign Hillary Clinton our next president. And he has America caught in the grip of his contradictions.
by Jacob Rubin, Slate
A new style guide says we should pepper our e-mails with them. Really?
by Parick T. Reardon, Chiacgo Tribune
Every reader has a personal ethic for how to treat a book, a morality for what can and can't be done to the physical object. Here are mine.
by Gina Kolata, New York Times
Are women really trying in these races and, if they are, why are older women beating younger women?
by Walter Nicholls, Washington Post
Friends jumps into an expanding street-cart scene with shawarma and a dream.
by Art Winslow, Chiacgo Tribune
Death seems to have provided William Shakespeare the best route to superstardom.
by Tom Dyckhoff, The Times
New York's skyline is one of the most distinctive in the world. But the city should stop trading on past glories.
by L.S. Asekoff, Slate
by Ali Fahmy, Identity Theory
by Donald Antrim, New Yorker
When I was a boy, it was said in my family that my mother, an otherwise respectable cook, had prepared for my father, during the first days of their marriage, a very bad dish. The dish was a hot tuna-and-mayonnaise casserole with potato chips as a decorative garnish. It was this tuna casserole that had, as it were, driven my father to teach himself to cook.
by Caroline Weber, New York Times
In "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," Dana Thomas investigates the business of designer clothing, leather goods and cosmetics, and finds it wanting. Hijacked, over the past two or three decades, by corporate profiteers with a "single-minded focus on profitability," the luxury industry has "sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers."
by Michael Lewis, New York Times
With the cost of natural disasters far beyond the insurance industry's ability to pay, a new market has sprung up to spread the risk. But how do you calculate the odds of catastrophe?
by Katherine Ozment, Salon
Since high school, I'd battle my curvy body into "skinny" jeans. But it wasn't until I wrestled my young daughter's round belly into stylish, slim pants that I knew the fashion madness had to stop.
by Stephen Mihm, Boston Globe
A century ago, that wasn't China — it was us.
by Susan Kinzie, Washington Post
Forget the quick goodbye hug after unloading the car. As campuses in and around Washington fill with new students this weekend and next, parents, it seems, are finding it harder than ever to let go.
by Julia Werdigier, New York Times
McDonald's is introducing healthier foods and items that cater to regional tastes, like caffe lattes. Hoping to attract more young dults and professionals, in addition to its core customer base of children, the chain is also adding amenities like internet access and rental iPods.
by Pete Jordan, New York Times
Little did I realize at the time how much this venture foreshadowed the kind of restless traveling (Greyhound/minimal baggage/half-baked plans) that, as an adult, I would spend more than a decade doing.
by David Brooks, New York Times
Reason and rationality play a limited role in political decisions.
by Emily Weinstein, Salon
A writer sifts through the wreckage of her schizophrenic sister's short life. Can she penetrate the helter-skelter chaos to understand what was going on in her mind?
by Jack Shafer, Slate
What my beloved newspaper has been reduced to serving.
by Ross Terrill, New York Times
Behind the attack n Chinglish lies an Orwellian impulse to remake the truth.
by Dilip Hiro, Salon
Throughout history, rising powers have overtaken superpowers. The United States will not prove an exception.
by Hannah Faith Notess, Slate
by Jeremy McCarter, The Guardian
Bush's former speechwriter has penned a column in praise of Shakespeare's plays. Maybe it's time someone gave the president a copy of the Complete Works?
by A. N. Wilson, Telegraph
What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?
The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or cafe, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustain them during the most creative phases of their lives.
by George Johnson, New York Times
Some magicians have intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.
by Wil Haygood, Washington Post
Ralph Ellison died leaving four decades' worth of scribbled notes, thousands of typed pages and 80 computer; disks filled with work on an ambitious second novel. For 14 years, a pair of literary detectives labored to fit the pieces together. Now they're ready to share with the world.
by Matthew Kirschenbaum, The Chronicle Of Higher Education
If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not known anything definitive about Shakespeare's original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things.
by David Wilson, The Times
Enough is enough. It's time for change. It's time to reassert the wisdom of the male instinct about a central area of our national life. It's time for everyone to admit that shopping is rubbish.
by Joe Rhodes, New York Times
It was 8 p.m., time for Tom Green's live internet talk show, the one he's been doing from his living room five nights a week, more or less, for the last year, and as seems to happen more often than not, things were going horribly wrong.
by Eric Gibson, Wall Street Journal
The wall between art-world realms is going, going...
by Mark Lilla, New York Times
Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
by Tm Harford, Slate
How physics can explain why some countries are rich and others are poor.
by Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times
Tommy Habeeb just wanted to be one of the new breed of involved dads: the hands-on guys who preside over bath time without creating a flood; the ones who return home from work early enough to crawl after their children toward the realm of make-believe. His ambitions did not include inventing the Water Bottle Nipple Adaptor.
by Charles Simic, New Yorker
by T Cooper, New Yorker
People say to me, "Didn't you hear anything?," or "Why didn't you stop when you felt somethng hit the bumper?" But I don't know how to answer either question. He was just there with us, alive, on eminute, as we were eating barbecue and watching the Super Bowl on TV at my brother-in-law's house, and then the next minute he was dead—very dead—under our car.
by Paul Simms, New Yorker
They say that your whole life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die, and I'm here to tell you that it's true.
by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
The false choice between treating terrorists as criminals or soldiers.
by Edison Jennings, Slate
by John Tierney, New York Times
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else's hobby.
by Andy Cowan, Los Angeles Times
'Back to school' in July? Christmas cards on Halloween? Why do we live so fast?
by John Leland, New York Times
As technology enables people to live and work wherever they want, increasingly they are clustering in resort playgrounds that have natural amenities, good weather — and, now, lots of people like themselves.
by Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times
The author of 'Neuromancer' takes another trippy journey into a parallel universe.
by Christopher Shea, Boston Globe
Stop your whining: leisure time is on the rise.
by Woody Allen, New York Times
I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I'm capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or sccumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one.
by Joshua Yaffa, New York Times
The typeface is the brainchild of Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer. They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard.
by Jennifer Gonnerman, New York Magazine
For $1.75 an hour, they put up with abusive employers, muggers, rain, snow, potholes, car accidents, six-day weeks, and lousy tips. Not anymore.
by Jill Hudson Neal, Washington Post
One step into school and the race begins. How does a Mom keep her cool?
by Steve Erlanger, New York Times
Israel is constructing a road through the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, that will allow both Israelis and Palestinians to travel along it — separately.
by Susie Boyt, Financial Times
I first met Wnedy Perriam six years ago at a literary festival in Devon.
by Allen Salkin, New York Times
Salad, it seems, is out. Gusto, medium rare, is in.
by Michael Gerson, Washington Post
It is a disturbing experience to watch your own brother, your flesh and blood, dabble in the occult, become consumed by ambition and then descend by stages into murder. And the last straw was when he ordered the slaughter of those children.
by Jeffrey Klineman, Slate
What makes southern sweet tea so special?
by Sloane Crosley, Salon
You may not be able to read a map but I get lost in the supermarket, due to my severe spatial disability.
by Indrani Sen, New York Times
Incubators, or community kitchens for entrepreneurs, have been sprouting across the country.
by Peter Carlson, Washington Post
Somewhere in Kalamazoo, Elvis weeps: The Weekly World News is folding.
by Alexandra Teague, Slate
by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
Before germ theory, humoral medicine — based on magical thinking and ignorant of human anatomy — dominated for 2,000 years. So why are today's doctors guided by some surprisingly principles?
by Mark Miller, Los Angeles Times
Well, the WWN is soon to be gone, and for that, we are all diminished. OK, maybe just I am diminished. I know my bank account is diminished.
by Michael M. Grynbaum, New York Times
Conversations over the last week indicate that the "b-word" (as it is referred to in the legislation) enjoys a surprisingly strong currency — and even some defenders — among many New Yorkers.
by Marion Nestle, Scientific American
How do you cope with a mountain of conflicting diet advice?
by Dan Zak, Washington Post
Is your day-to-day disappointingly dull? Aim for something completely different.
by Doreen Carvajal, New York Times
Most of the brides and grooms are more familiar with Shinto practices than Christian rites. But they are flocking to Paris and other romantic European locations in search of rituals, stained glass and bellowing pipe organs, all chosen from convenient online catalogs.
by Louise Gluck, New Yorker
by Hari Kunzru, New Yorker
by Yoni Brenner, New Yorker
by Ian Fisher, New York Times
The story of how Ponte Milvio, north of Rome's center, became the city’s symbol of love follows a particularly Italian script blending history, myth, truly ludicrous political posturing and the unexpected.
by Jenny Turner, The Guardian
From chemistry sets to homemade face scrubs — following the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys comes The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls, with anthologies from children's classics Look and Learn and Ladybird on the way. What does the popularity of nostalgia lit tell us about ourselves today?
by Neil Bowdler, BBC News
From HG Wells to the latest Big Brother challenge, time travel has sparked the popular imagination. Now, an American scientist has broken his silence about his dream of time travel, with a book documenting his life-long struggle to build a time machine.
by Louise Tucker, The Guardian
So, today's book industry is focused on profit margins and it's tough for authors to get themselves in print. What's new?
by Jeannie Marie Laskas, Washington Post
Courage can get you into deep water.
by John McCarthy, as told to Mark Pothier, Boston Globe
I've questioned my resume. I've debated leaving the state. I've doubted my self-worth.
by Maureen Fan, Washington Post
No longer limited to well-known bars or a growing number of karaoke parlors, prostitutes are everywhere in Chinat today, branching out onto college campuses, moving into private residential compounds and approaching customers on mobile phone networks.
by Robert Sandall, Prospect Magazine
In recent years, the economics of pop music have been upended. The market for CDs has collapsed, and not even the rise of legal downloading can offset the damages to record companies. Meanwhile, demand for live performances has rocketed.
by Michael Ignatieff, New York Times
The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion.
by Joel Stein, Los Angeles Times
The main difference between me and the average blogger is that I get paid. How long I can continue to earn a living off of something people do just as well for free is a question I occasinally ask myself, and one I frequently am asked by people who send me hate mail.
by Michael Laris, Washington Post
Inspiration to find a new way to view the county came from years of frustration with the marred paper copies of aerial photo sthat provided a disjointed and grease-pencil-stained picture of Fairfax's history.
by Andrew Adam Newman, New York Times
Is it acceptable, they debate within and among themselves, to listen to that month's book rather than read it? Or is that cheating, like watching the movie instead of readng the book?
by Erwin R. Tiongson, New York Times
It is a terrible gift, the transitory loss — the momentary panic, the unexpected restoration and the one, final, permanent loss indelibly etched into it.
by Tyler Smith, Identity Theory
by William Grimes, New York Times
Christine Kenneally's lucid survey of the expanding field of language evolution is dedicated to solving what she calls "the hardest problem in science today."
by Frank Bruni, New York Times
At fancy restaurants, the inebriation comes at a higher price, but it looks much the same.
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