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by Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
Doris Lessing sees the world change and gives it her spin. A Nobel Prize won't change that.
by Dave Barry, Miami Herald
It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history.
by Lee Siegel, New York Times
If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay.
by Taylor Clark, Slate
Why the franchise actually helps mom and pop coffeeshouses.
by Jacques Leslie, Mother Jones
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
by Bob Thompson, Washington Post
Per Petterson's poignant family tales have placed him on the literary map.
by Maria Glod, Washington Post
Too many elementary school teachers, education experts say, lack the know-how to teach math effectively.
by Rosanna Warren, Slate
by Anand Giridharadas, New York Times
The professional letter writer is confronting the fate of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the world's fastest-growing market for cellphones, calling the village or sending a text message ha all but supplanted the practice of dictating intimacies to someone else.
by Maureen Fan, Washington Post
In a borrowed classroom of the provincial Communist Party School, a newly busy philosophy professor addressed 15 well-groomed adult students. His message: Try to have a soul.
by Roddy Doyle, New York Times
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
Since Mariko Hashimoto arrived from Kyushu in 1987, she has adapted to daily life in New York. She uses broccoli rabe instead of aka takana (spicy mustard greens), shops in the Caribbean markets of her Washington Heights neighborhood for batatas rather than Japanese satsumaimo (yellow sweet potatoes), and has learned to love the local mofongo, the Dominican version of mashed plantains with lots of garlic.
But at this time of year, Ms Hashimoto said, she feels very Japanese, missing her home in the city of Kumamoto, where her family has a 100-year-old business brewing soy sauce and miso.
by George Johnson, New York Times
Who or what is to blame when a once-powerful society collapses?
by Heather King, Los Angeles Times
When Mom began losing her memory, I found my family.
by Guy Trebay, New York Times
I could be succumbing to an attack of O. Henry here, but it seems truer than ever to me that the strange and the ambiguous and the mixed and the heartbreaking intentions behind present-giving are an overlooked bonus.
by Jasper Fforde, Guardian
"So who's the victim?" asked Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, shaking his overcoat of the cold winter rain as he entered Usher Towers. "It's Locked Room Mystery," explained his amiable sidekick, Detective Sergeant Mary Mary. "He was found dead at 7.30pm. But get this: the library had been locked... from the inside."
by Grant Barrett, New York Times
What follows is by no means a complete list of words that took our attention this year, but rather a sampling from the thousands that endured long enough to find a place in the national conversation.
by Neely Tucker, Washington Post
It would be a crime to let these tales die. That's where 'Black Lizard' anthology comes in.
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
If advances in artificial intelligence continue, your next lover may have an on/off switch.
by Leah Price, New York Times
Today, as we supersize our burgers and abridge our books, reading and eating continue to provoke symmetrical anxieties.
by Henry Allen and Andrew Cutraro, Washington Post
For richer, for poorer, Pennsylvania Avenue weds the city together.
by Jonathan Dee, New York Times
How a business-school professor and consultant for Mattel would turn "Made in China" into something other than a curse.
by Eduardo Cruz Eusebio, Chicago Reader
When Sam was born he was chubby and round, with slits for eyes. We called him Baby Buddha. But as he's gotten older he's started to look less and less Asian. His hair has grown curly and brown with red highlights like his mother's. He actually has a bridge on his nose, something I didn't enjoy until I reached my teens. His face has grown longer, his eyes wider.
by Heidi Bell, Chicago Reader
J calls it boredom, which M knows from adolescent psychology is another word for age-appropriate restlessness but feels like a squirming desire to burst out of the shell of useless skin. M thinks about how it's still a town where people leave their doors unlocked at night and in the winter warm up their empty cars at the curb.
by Mistress Matisse, The Stranger
The ups and downs of being a sex worker during the holidays.
by Adi Ignatius, Time
No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian president's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian president not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.
by Stephen Metcalf, Slate
How will its fans defend it now?
by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian
It was a revelation that once could have destroyed a career. But when the former child star and famously private double Oscar winner finally 'came out' at an awards ceremony, it was her timing that fascinated the media.
by Kevin Barents, Slate
Root-barbels high on the soaked trunks grope
what bits of water drilled into the air.
We mvoe together through the woods: a two.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which "came" first — the laws or the universe?
by Gary Kamiya, Salon
When your children grow up, you have to say goodbye to part of them — and part of yourself.
by Robert Olen Butler, Nerve.com
Robert Olen Butler's forthcoming book Intercourse imagines the interior monologues of copulating couples throughout history, from Princess Diana and Prince Charles to a chicken and a rooster. Here are three.
by Andrew Marshall and John Stanmeyer, National Geographic Magazine
In Indonesia, life plays out in the shadow of fiery peaks.
by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are.
by Saki Knafo, New York Times
Ms Geraghty's great-great-great-grandmother bought the house at 312 Clinton Street for $4,000 in 1866. At the time, an outhouse stood in the backyard and hroses were quartered next door.
For the next 140 years, a period spanning Brooklyn's consolidation with New York, the family discarded practically nothing: not the trunks of hand-woven bedspreads and frilly Victorian undergarments, nto the boxes of handwritten grocery receipts dating to the 1880s, not the chunks of petrified laundry starch now piled in a 19th-century beer pail called a growler.
by Fady Joudah, New Yorker
Why are there onions the size of swallows in your maple tree?
In the land of cactus wind the one-eyed dwell.
by David Segal, Washington Post
The first time Neil deGrasse Tyson got a good look at the universe, he thought it was a hoax. He was a 9-year-old, visiting the Hayden Planetarium on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and when the lights went down and a narrated tour of the night sky began, an ocean of stars twinkled overhead.
Yea, right, he thought.
by Sally Satel, New York Times
In the fall of 2005, I started my first online relationship. He was a 62-year-old retireee from Canada; I was a 49-year-old psychiatrist living in Washington. Beginning in early October of that year, we talked or e-mailed several times a week. This arrangement was novel to both of us, so our conversations were tentative at first, but we soon grew more comfortable, and excitement over our shared visioin blossomed. After a few weeks, we decided to meet for a uniquely intimate encounter. After New Year's, the Candian would fly to Washington to meet me — at a hospital, where he would give me one of his kidneys. Thank God.
by Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy Blog
Science doesn't take away from the beauty of nature. It enhances it, multiplies it.
by Douglas Goetsch, The American Scholar
How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand.
by Jerome M. Segal, Washington Post
Surely the Bible can teach and inspire. But has it lost the ability to startle? TO make us gasp?
by The Economist
Human evolution has speeded up over the past 80,000 years. That raises awkward questions about the concept of "race."
by P. J. O'Rourke, New York Times
There's a great story to be told about the success of Starbucks. But we'll have to wait to hear it from somebody other than Taylor Clark.
by James Meek, Guardian
For clarity, we need common, current words; but, used alone, these are commonplace, and as ephemeral as everyday talk. For distinction, we need words not heard every minute, unusual words, large words, foreign words, metaphors; but, used alone, these become bogs, vapours, or at worst, gibberish. What we need is a diction that weds the popular with the dignified, the clear current with the sedgy margins of language and thought.
by Maureen Orth, New York Times
When Roberta and Rowena Wright first started traveling together, their father had to use a crank to get the car going. But once they got moving, they never stopped.
by Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
Americans go for self-help, the French for philosophy and the British for trivia: the phenomenon of the Christmas bestseller.
by Greg Beato, Reason Magazine
Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it's easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the GOlden Arches and its ilk. It's also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.
by Daniel Kalder, Guardian
Until recently, Daniil Kharms' unsettling stories were best known to the Soviet secret police. Only now are they set to reach a wider public.
by Brendan Boyle, New York Sun
Under its brutally efficient authority, Latin went from being, in the fourth century before the common era, only one of several languages spoken on the Italian peninsula to being, in the fourth century of the comon era, the one language spoken throughout a region bounded by Britain in the West and Moldova in the East.
by Anne Barnard, New York Times
Now, as Mr. Wolfe turns his attention to a new novel about immigration — set, no doubt to the disappointment of some New Yorkers and the relief of others, in Miami — the milestone of "Bonfire" provides a moment to consider how the city's own narrative has (so far) turned out. How and why New York pulled back from the brink is a matter of as much dispute as the reaction to "Bonfire," which became a best seller.
by Bob Thompson, Washington Post
To find Nick Homby's latest novel, 'Slam,' you have to think young.
by Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post
How frustrating the "no" word can be: for the parent trying to corral a wayward child, for an employee fighting for a raise, for a diplomat trying to broker agreement between warring countries.
But consider what can hapen when people don't say no.
by Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair
When Theresa Duncan, 40, took her own life on July 10, followed a week later by her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, 35, their friends were stunned and the press was fascinated: what had destroyed this glamorous couple, stars of New York's multi-media art world, still madly in love after 12 years?
by Sandra Beasley, Slate
by Frank Bidart, New Yorker
by Jonathan Lethem, New Yorker
This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences.
by Stephen Metcalf, New York Times
Single-masterpiece authors tend to divide into two camps: the Eternals (Cervantes, Sterne, Melville), or the world-historical quacks who pack into a single, unyielding wallop; and the Eternal Adolescents (De Quincey, Kerouac, Exley), or burnout cases who pull it together to manufacture a cult clasic. It was Lowry's fate to fall right in between the two.
by Elizabeth Khuri, Los Angeles Times
Melissa Barak, the newest leading dancer of the Los Angeles Ballet, sashays into town with 'The Nutcracker' and—what else—a very Hollywood burlesque act.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
My supposedly better knee — the left one — has suddenly informed me that he is taking charge from now on, and there will be a few changes around here, by cracky.
by Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times
Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments.
by David Samo, Los Angeles Times
The e-book reader raises questions about the fundamentals of literature and its future.
by Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
In 1500, our ancestors thought the natural world testified to divine purpose. Floods, plagues, periods of fertility and flourishing were seen as acts of God. Now "acts of God" is a dead metaphor used by lawyers. How did that happen?
by Doris Lessing, Guardian
Writing, writers do not come out of houses without books.
by Alex Lemon, InDigest
by Bob Thompson, Washington Post
This is what it's come to, folks: A distinguished editor and a widely respected writer are talking about getting naked and jumping off cliffs.
by Roy Greenslade, Evening Standard
In an era of increasing print retrenchment, how cna a decidedly serious magazie that eschews any hint of vulgarity, either in content or promotion, enjoy such continuing success?
by James Wolcott, The New Republic
Of all the nightmares on Elm Street haunting America's sleep, the bleak state of book reviewing would rank rather low on the worry meter, somewhere between the decline of the sitcom and the disappearance of the pay phone. The shrinkage, the consolidation, and the slow massacre of book review sections and arts coverage in the nation's newspapers and magazines doesn't seem like an urgent cause, not with so many other, bigger calamities piling up on the docks.
by Jim Yardley, New York Times
For many Chinese, turtles symbolize health and longevity, but the saga of the last two Yangtze giant soft-shells is more symbolic of the threatened state of wildlife and biodiversity in China.
by Kim Severson, New York Times
THe entree, long the undisputed centerpiece of an Amercian restaurant meal, is dead.
O.K., so maybe it's not quite time to write the entree's obituary. But in many major dining cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago, the main course is under attack.
by David Brooks, New York Times
Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.
by John Hazard, Slate
by Peter Plagens, Newsweek
The last art form to be tethered to realism, its factual validity has lately been manipulated and pixelated to the pont of extinction.
by Kevin Young, New Yorker
by D. Nurkse, New Yorker
by Charles Simic, New Yorker
by Jennifer Egan, New Yorker
by Alex Koppelman, Salon
The foundation of great cooking is technique, not recipes.
by Ben Yagoda, Slate
Steve Martin explains how he got so funny.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
"Last Night at the Lobster" is packed with details as it meticulously chronicles the efforts of Manny DeLeon, the restaurant's manager, to get through the final day with some dignity.
by Diana Abu-Jaber, Washington Post
Let others have their security blankets! I had a security shag rug bedspread.
by Wyatt Mason, New York Times
Despite the frequency of its use, "America" is actually somewhat difficult to define.
by Tom McNichol, New Yorker
by Garrison Keillor, Washington Post
When I was 12, two things happened that made me a writer. I shoplifted a book of poems from a department store a few days before Christmas, and my cousin ROger drowned in Lake Minnetonka the week he graduated from high school in Minneapolis.
by Liesl Schillinger, New York Times
Ahh, the lure of hte madman — the harrowed, sinewy figure with glowing eyes who approaches out of the shadows, burning to communicate his incommunicable truth.
by James Campbell, Guardian
More and more modern classics are appearing 'restored', with the handiwork of editors removed. Is it mere meddling or vital to understand authors' intentions?
by Andrew Martin, New York Times
Suddenly, after years of chaotic, conflicting health claims on food, various groups are rushing to create systems that are supposed to make sense of it all.
by Jim Al-Khalili, The Guardian
If only we could prove that the multiverse was real, we could explaint he contradictions of quantum mechanics.
by The Economist
A full-blown dollar collapse would be disastrous. Thankfully, it need not happen.
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