MyAppleMenu | Tomorrow | Reader | Singapore | Music
You are here in the archive: MyAppleMenu Reader > 2007 > October
by Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times
The house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called "the conductor," since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand.
by Marc Kaufman, Washington Post
With many promising areas to research, the supermassives are drawing astronomers and astrophysicists back into the black hole research.
by Regina Schrambling, Los Angeles Times
Cooking up a delicious blog is much easier than you might think.
by Daniel Seidel, Slate
How the web revived a storied tradition of expletive-laced tirades.
by Barry Spacks, Slate
by William J. Broad, New York Times
By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world's first atom bomb.
Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.
by Robert Bly, New Yorker
by Roddy Doyle, New Yorker
by Greg Ruffing, Newsweek
There was a time when food allergies were of little concern to the medical community. Today about 11 million Americans suffer from them, and many scientists agree the numbers are climbing.
by Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Tolstoy's unflinching "War and Peace," in a new translation, takes us inside historic battles and contradictory hearts.
by Bryan Burrough, Washington Post
Two books pose off-beat questions and provide clever answers.
by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett, Boston Globe
We shouldn't believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently.
by Maggie Jones, New York Times
Adoptive parents are increasingly trying to pry open international adoptions by searching for the biological mothers of their children. But finding them can turn out to be the easy part.
by Michael Ryan, New Yorker
by Nora Zelevansky, Salon
Couples are commemorating shattered vows with the same kind of fanfare accorded their marriage — complete with announcements, parties and even vacation funds.
by Po Bronson, New York Magazine
Overstimlated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour's less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.
by Lawrence Downes, New York Times
America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word "illegal." It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions.
by Emily Bazelon, Slate
An ode to store-bought Halloween costumes.
by Matthew Preusch, New York Times
It's called hunting the $100 hamburger — "$100" referring to the cost of fuel — sort of the aeronautical equivalent of lazy Sunday drives in which the destination isn't as important as the pleasure of getting away. The thrill level, though, is just a bit higher than that of tooling through the New England countryside in fall foliage season.
by Ruth La Ferla, New York Times
Lingerie's cachet as a sexy, emphatically visible component of a woman's outfit has contributed to rising sales.
by Sidney Blumenthal, Salon
Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.
by J. Robert Lennon, The Litlab
by Jack Lynch, Los Angeles Times
Sadism pervades the text and the story can be confusing. Yet there is something irresistible about Shakespeare's play.
by Scott McCredie, Washington Post
Train your mind and you can train your body — to hop or dance or even perform a balancing act like this.
by Walter Nicholls, Washington Post
Shrimp dumplings formed into swans. Green tea ball stuffed with black sesame paste. For Janet Yu, there can never be too many kinds of dim sum, Cantonese for "heart's delight."
by Jill McDonough, Slate
by David Segal, Washington Post
Looking for a perfect little weekend vacation this fall? Here's a travel tip you don't hear very often: Head to Pittsburgh. Right away.
Seriously, get in the car and read this story later, because when you're done reading, you'll wish you'd left 10 minutes ago. There are towns with better vistas, sure, and there are getaways with more sunshine. But only Pittsburgh is the scene of the fabulously tawdry and surpassingly vicious spectacle that is the divorce of Richard Mellon Scaife.
by Natalie Angier, New York Times
By all evidence, outrangeously bad dreams are a universal human experience.
by Benedict Carey, New York Times
Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learnng and memory.
by Daniel Gross, Slate
The strange timing of the Fox Business Channel.
by Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post
For a growing number of the world's emigrants, China — not the United States — is the land where opportunities are endless, individual enterprise is rewarded and tolerance is universal.
by Davie Itzkoff, New York Times
To many fans, and to many people who worked on "Bee Movie," the film represents the first real reutnr of Mr. Seinfeld since the end of his television show, a welcoming back after what appeared to be a self-imposed absense.
by Alan Weisman, Los Angeles Times
Humans are funny, humans are lovely and humans also get themselves into trouble if they underestimate the consequences of their actions. But they can learn from their mistakes.
by Jan Freeman, Boston Globe
Let's not sweat 10 times less, five times more, or a threefold increase. Unless we're getting dumber by the decade, there's no reason we should boggle at these old familiar usages.
by Janet Maslin, New York Times
Valerie Plame Wilson begins her memoir, "Fair Game," on a note of toughness: She describes paramilitary drills in which she participated as a C.I.A. trainee. Her book also includes a photograph of her as a 2 ½-year-old at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, sitting in the cockpit of an airplen with her feisty little hands on the controls.
by Virginia Heffernan, New York Times
What about the idea of surrending your actual identity — your name, rank and serial number in the real world — to a wonderland of play in mysterious realms?
by Peter Marks, Washington Post
It's supposed to be completely dark in the auditorium, but instead all these little light shows are going on. FLICK! The face of the guy across the aisle is bathed in a blue electronic glow. FLICK! Another man two seats down regularly seems to blink on and off — he's a neon sign in jeans and sports coat. FLICK! FLICK! Two girls sitting several rows away seem to be radiating a slightly purple haze.
by Clark Hoyt, New York Times
The New York Times best-seller list is a powerful and mysterious institution that both reports and drives the sales of books around the nation.
by Simon Romero, New York Times
On the surface it resembles any other improverished Colombian village. But when adults here speak with one another, their language draws inspiration from as far away as the COngo River Basin in Africa.
by Rob Long, Los Angeles Times
As a professional writer, I've always been pretty good at not writing. Not writing, in fact, is one of my chief skills. I can not write anywhere — on a plane, in a coffee shop, in my office — and I often feel that a day spent without not writing is a day wasted. I even keep a notebook by the side of the bed, in case I wake up with an idea at 3 in the morning and don't want to write it down in case I don't forget it.
So, obviously, the prospect of a writer strike puts me in a cruious position.
by Kristina Shevory, New York Times
Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, Alice Keller hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.
by Kim Severson, New York Times
Around the country, dozens of farm-to-school programs are trying to get local food back into the schools. But it's harder than it might seem.
by Philip Schultz, Slate
by Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times
If you're unsure of whether human life begins at conception, why not give the unborn the benefit of the doubt?
by Tim Cahill, National Geographic Magazine
In America's hottest and lowest place—its largest national park outside Alaska—dust can turn day into twilight, and rocks move unseen across the desert.
by Steven Pinker, The New Republic
The strange emotional power of swearing—as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures—suggests taht taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain.
by A.L. Bardach, Washington Post
I didn't know the mother of three who died shackled to a bench in the Phoenix airport on Sept. 28, en route to an alcohol treatment center in Tucson. I don't know, beyond what I read in the newspapers, what troubles weighed on her. But I do know this: Based on my own recent flight experiences, hers was a death foretold.
by Matt Gross, New York Times
Flying to a remote corner of India and braving the long drive into the Himalayas may seem like an awful lot of effort for a good cup of tea, but Darjeeling tea isn't simply good. It's about the best in the world.
by Thomas Mallon, New Yorker
The complex orbits of Wernher von Braun.
by Daniel Gross, New York Times
In today's burgeoning and increasingly integrated global financial markets — a vast, neural spaghetti of wires, web sites and trading platforms — the N.Y.S.E. is clearly no longer the epicenter.
by Austin Ramzy, Time
Demand from China, along with other fast-growing emerging economies, has driven up the price of oil and a wide range of other commodities for the past several years. But what's really worrying many economists is the sudden apearance of relatively high inflation within China and the ripples that might cause abroad.
by Bill Maher, Salon
This generation doesn't sacrifice or even pay for our wars. No, all we do is sport pins and bumper stickers.
by John Strausbaugh, New York Times
Last month the City of New York gave Duffield Street in downtown Brooklyn an alternate name: Abolitionist Place. It's an acknowledgment that long before Brooklyn was veined with subway lines, it was a hub of the Underground Railroad: the network of sympathizers and safe houses throughout the North that helped as many as 100,000 slaves flee the South before the Civil War.
by David Colman, New York Times
Necktie sales may have foundered in the decade or more since the words "casual Friday" entered men's vocabularies, but in the last year or two, stylish men in their 20s and early 30s have embraced the old four-in-hand as a style statement — that is, as long as it is an optional one.
by Michelle Slatalla, New York Times
Ever since she went off to college I've come to think of my daughter as Virtual Zoe.
by Slavoj Zizek, New York Times
Perhaps we find China's reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but becuase they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don't take quite seriously, and tryng to contain its political consequences through the law.
by Jerome Groopman, New Yorker
What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.
by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair
Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice.
by David Gewanter, Slate
by Daniel Gross, Slate
What pick-your-own apple orchards tell us about the American economy.
by Roger Cohen, New York Times
Having read about Carol Ann Gotbaum, my head filled with her disoriented rage before punitive officialdom, I did something I rarely do. I went back and read my mother's suicide note of July 25, 1978.
by Erik Himmelsbach, Los Angeles Times
Nothing beats the life out of a good recording more than reading about it. It's the rare pop music critic whose prose can approximate the moon-launcing emotional jolt a listener gets from hearing an amazing song.
by Maureen Dowd, New York Times
It's hard not to like a book that expounds on Marilyn Monroe on one page and the Monroe Doctrine on the next. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ruminates on the realm of hemispheric affairs, the transition from one Monroe to the other is seamless, as is the slide from Bosnia to Bianca Jagger and from Alexander Hamilton to Angie Dickinson. His diaries are a Tifany's window of name-dropping. THis is not history so much as historical trail mix.
by JOel Garreau, Washington Post
In the age of the networked computer, museums are being fundamentally challenged in the same ways that other bastions of education and entertainment — from libraries to the music industry — are being rocked to their cores.
by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times
Paris ordinarily defines itself to visitors as a city of museums, monuments, neighborhoods and shopping-and-eating opportunities. But there is another way into the history, culture and daily fabric of this city's life, a voyage of discovery into a world overlooked even by Parisians themsleves: its nearly 100 churches.
by Judith Warner, New York Times
Recently, a couple of things happened that made me realize that it was perhaps time to reconsider my opposition to cable TV.
by Ron Rosenbaum, Slate
Regian your dignity with this secret weapon.
by Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times
Is there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?
by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, Salon
The food industries processes the life out of our flakes and puffs, then sponsors studies boasting of their helath benefits. Isn't it time to rebel against breakfast cereal supremacy?
by Leslie Brenner, Los Angeles Times
In a dining world gone wacky, it's tables, tables everywhere, but not a time to eat. At least not the time you wanted.
by Anna Badkhen, Boston Globe
It may come as no surprise, in an age defined by mouse-clicks, that bookmobiles are disappearing.
by Kevin Young, Slate
by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.
See Also:
Is This The America Of 9/11, or 9/12?, by New York Times.
by Michael Wines, New York Times
In southern Africa, a child's name is chosen to convey a specific meaning, and not, as is common in the West, the latest fashion. Increasingly, however, those traditional names are bestowed not in Nidebele, Sotho or some other local language, but in English, the world's lingua franca.
by Anne Applebaum, Slate
The United States has lost its aura of competence. That's a problem.
by Roger Cohen, New York Times
The unpopularity of George W. Bush has led many to believe global America-hating will ebb once he leaves office on Jan 20, 2009. That's a dangerous assumption.
by Tessa Hadley, New Yorker
by Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon
So why can't we find any place to park? Because parking is one of the biggest boondoggles — and environmental disasters — in our country.
by Stephen King, New York Times
The American short story is alive and well.
Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true.
by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
A hidden price of being happier on average is that you put your short-term contentment at risk, because being happy raises your expectations about being happy. Whe good things happen, they don't count for much because they are what you expect. When bad things happen, you temporarily feel terrible, because you've gotten used to being happy.
by Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
So few book reivews, so many books. No, it hasn't started appearing on T-shirts yet, but wait.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.