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by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times
In a presidential campaign that has involved battles over everything from Iraq to driver's licenses, one sweeping topic has gone curiously unexamined: Does it diminish American democracy if we keep the presidency int he same two families that have held it since 1989?
by Harold McGee, New York Times
Just in time, a scientific report has some new findings that may cause fotball fans to take a second look at that communal bowl of dip.
by Gregory Norminton, Guardian
by Jean Hannah Edelstein, Guardian
They're no less artful than full-length books, but they need less of your time. The perfect form for today's lifestyles.
by Bonny Wolf, Washington Post
I think I actually have eaten squirrel. It was not intentional.
by Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times
Why would anyone cook a perfectly good oyster? It's simple — there's no arguing with delicious.
by Josh Levin, Slate
And other monstrously stupid bank security questions.
by Rachel Hadas, Slate
by germaine Greer, Guardian
The woman who displays her own body as her artwork seems to me to be travelling in the tracks of an outworn tradition that spirals downward and inward to nothingness.
by Tessa Hadley, New Yorker
by Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
Those who thought the writers' strike would bring down Leno misunderstood the power of his limitations.
by Janet Maslin, New York Times
"The Appeal" is John Grisham's handy primer on a timely subject: how to rig an election.
by Judith Warner, New York Times
I love coffee. And though I have, previously, shown myself willing to forgo all kinds of food and drink in the quest to rid myself of migraines, coffee is one habit that I am firmly committed never to break.
by Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe
Wham-O's Richard Knerr brought America the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, the Superball - and viral marketing.
by Geoffrey C. Ward, New York Times
Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. The lasting but little-understood impact of all that sacrifice is the subject of Drew Gilpin Faust's extraordinary new book, "This Republic of Suffering: Dath and the American Civil War."
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker
How do you get a bunch of normal chicks to strip and say cheese, assuming you're not a Mardi Gras regular or a Seven Sisters posture photographer? That was the dilemma facing Margot Roth, a first-time filmmaker, as she attempted to recruit participants for a documentary about naked women.
by Billy Collins, New Yorker
When I finally arrive there—
and it will take many days and nights—
I would like to believe others will be waiting
and might even want to know how it was.
by Francesca Segal, Guardian
In the time it takes you to read this page, Britons will have bought 100 novels by Mills & Boon, now in its centnary year.
by Melena Ryzik, New York Times
For union film and television writers, life without employment is starting to exact its toll.
by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times
Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways.
by Mark Bittman, New York Times
A sea change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn't oil.
It's meat.
by Ben Ehrenreich, Poetry Foundation
In which our reporter falls for Frank Stanford's poetry, heads for the lost road of Arkansas, and searches for the man behind the myth.
by Peter Carey, Financial Times
Toay, on this New York morning, lying in bed, listening to the shower — today I will permit myself to take a holiday from writing.
by Mark Lawson, Guardian
Crime books easier to write than 'serious' novels? That attitude is, frankly, cobblers.
by John Keillor, National Post
In 1908, after being lambasted in the press and cuckolded by his wife, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented classical music. We're still trying to figure out what comes next.
by Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper
How does an upstart poetry publisher pass the bullshit test?
by Sara Blask, The Smart Set
At the Reykjavik bookstore where the chess great spent his final, hermit-like days.
by Joel Waldfogel, Slate
When he's in the field, everyone else plays worse. How Tiger throws off golf's incentive structure.
by Oliver Schwaner-Albright, New York Times
Professionals have long been willing to pay prices in the five figures for the perfect espresso machine, but the siphon bar does not make espresso. It makes brewed coffee, signaling the resurgence of brewing among the most obsessive coffee enthusiasts.
by Derek Walcott
And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what shold be called not its "making" but its remaking, the fragmented memory, the armature that frames the god, event he rite that surrenders it to a final pyre; the god assembled cane by cane, reed by weaving reed, line by plaited line, as the artisans of Felicity wold erect his holy echo.
by Derek Walcott
by Derek Walcott
by Joe Osterhaus, Slate
by Scott Rosenberg, Wordyard
The news itself remains valuable. But most people are happy getting the headlines.
by Stephen Sandy, The Atlantic
by David Simon, Washington Post
Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?
by Natalie Angier, New York Times
Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook polticians.
by Mark Ravenhill, Guardian
At some point, every successful writer craves anonymity... until the rejection letters arrive.
by Les Murray, New Yorker
by Tom Scocca, Boston Globe
How do you name someone you hardly know?
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, Washington Post
A modern shopper pulls herself up by her boot laces.
by Katherine Maxfield, San Francisco Chronicle
My religious philosophy has finally congealed: There is no personal or intergalactic God, and life, at least mine, is best lived by the Golden Rule, period. Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" gathered my disjointed thoughts into the tidy statement. It's a relief to have it settled. Now what do I do about all the prayers?
by Deborah Coddington, New Zealand Herald
Why do we fall about at the feet of poets whose work is just plain dull?
by Michael Morpurgo, Telegraph
Of course we must and should study literature in our schools, but first we have to imbue our children with a love of stories.
by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times
Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and ready by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, "The Tale of Genji," a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.
by Andrew Motion, Guardian
A reassessment must not only reinterpret what is already known; it must remake the case for general readers almost from scratch.
by Neil Modie, New York Times
A thick veil of snow had settled on Kilimanjaro the morning after my group arrived in Tanzania. Over breakfast, we gazed at the peak filling the sky above the palm trees of our hotel courtyard in Moshi, the town closest to the mountain. It was as Hemingway described it: "as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun."
by Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
Bobby Fischer, who died a melancholy exile's death Friday at age 64, was that most perplexing of human characters — a protean genius and a repellent man. He was to American chess what Ezra Pound was to American poetry.
by Denis Donoghue, Chronicle Of Higher Education
Eloquence is not the same as rhetoric. Eloquence isn't even a distant cousin of rhetoric — it comes from a different family and has different eyes, hair, and gait. Long thought to be a subset of rhetoric's devices, eloquence has declared its independence: It has no designs on readers or audiences. Its aim is pleasure; it thrives on freedom among the words. Unlike rhetoric, it has not sent any soldier to be killed in foreign countries.
by Edna Lewis, Gourmet
There is something about the South that stimulaes creativity in people.
by Jeffrey Kluger, Time
The lure of losing our faculties is one of the things that makes sex thrilling—and one of the vey things that keeps the species going. As far as your genes are concerned, your principal job while you're alive is to conceive offspring, bring them to adulthood and then obligingly die so you don't consume resources better spent on the yong Anything that encourages you to breed now and breed plenty gets that job done.
But mating and the rituals surrounding it make us come unhinged in other ways too, ones that are harder to explain by the mere babymaking imperative.
by Ward Rubrecht, City Pages
Inspired by comic books, ordinary citizens are putting on masks to fight crime.
by James Fallows, The Atlantic
The Chinese are subsidizing the American way of life. Are we playing them for suckers—or are they playing us?
by Eric G. Wilson, Chronicle Of Higher Education
American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life.
by Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
They may not cost any money, but free evening papers are exacting a heavy toll from literate culture.
by Ron Rosenbaum, Slate
Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?
by Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times
Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world.
But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.
by Annie Leibovitz, Vanity Fair
Between them, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have made 13 of the 100 top-grossing movies of all time. Yet they struggled for more than a decade with the upcoming fourth installment of their billion-dollar Indiana Jones franchise.
by Michael Ryan, Slate
by Peter Saunders, Policy
Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it.
by Robert Mezey, New Yorker
by T. Coraghessan Boyle, New Yorker
by Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times
Evolution accounts for a lot of our strange ideas about finances.
by Mick Brown, Telegraph
He may take nearly a decade between novels, but then Jeffrey Eugenides likes to take his time - and as a Pulitzer prizewinner and author of the cult novel The Virgin Suicides, he is clearly on the right track.
by Kay Hymowitz, Wall Street Journal
The home-improvement industry has always been a no-woman's land known for its drab aisles lined with nail bins and mysterious steel objects whose purpose was understood only by grunting guys in flannel shirts. Now it is going designer pink.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
by Finlo Rohrer, BBC News
We listen to our music on nanos, we style our hair with nanos, with the arrival of the Tata Nano people will even be driving nanos, but why are so many products called nano?
by Monte Reel, Washington Post
Discovery of a lone survivor of an unknown Indian tribe in Brazil set off accusations of murder and a struggle over ownership of one of the world's last great wilderness areas.
by Rebecca Dana, Wall Street Journal
20 years later, "thirtysomething" isn't even available on DVD, and none of its cast members have gone on to acting stardom. But nearly all of them have become highly influential in the entertainment world in other ways, stepping behind the cameras to write, direct and product hit television shows this season.
by Nora Ephron, New York Times
The other day I felt a cold coming on. So I decided to have chicken soup to ward off the cold. Nonetheless I got the cold. This happens all the time: you think you're getting a cold; you have chicken soup; you get the cold anyway. So: is it possible that chicken soup gives you a cold?
by Sophie Gee, New York Times
Modern popularizers have come to the rescue, with striking commercial success.
by Max Taves, LA Weekly
Doomed by 1950s tree planters, who never imagined the ferocity of the consumer age.
by Allen Salkin, New York Times
by Doron Taussig, Washington Monthly
Taylor Clark's weak case against Starbucks.
by Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine
America's burgeoning money culture is producing a record number of heirs—but handing down values is harder than handing down wealth.
by Joshua Kurlantzick, Portfolio.com
With the Beijing Olympics only months away, a massive wave of protests is sweeping the country over government landgrabs—and unlike past movements, many of the demonstrators are urban professionals. Will the battles over property spur demands for broader rights?
by Benjamin R. Barber, Wilson Quarterly
What's gone wrong here? Why, as a nation, are we so obsessed with competition, so indifferent to cooperation?
by John Sutherland, Guardian
It's still pretty much a male preserve in real life, so why has AL Kennedy chosen to grasp the fictional joystick?
by Stefan Theil, Foreign Policy
In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind.
by Tom Sleigh, Slate
The first word God said made everything
out of noting. But the nothing shows through—
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Whether they are old-fashioned narratives, playful improvisations or comic-strip-like tales told in pictures, these stories force us to re-evaluate that old chestnut "Character is destiny."
by Craig Seligman, Salon
The polemical sequel to "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan's new book shows how processed foods are making us fat and sick — and why eaters must revolt.
by Stanley Fish, New York Times
To the question "of what use are the humanities?", the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject.
by David Curran, San Francisco Chronicle
When my daughter grew out of her rosy ride, we proposed giving it to our son. And he let us know - in about two seconds - that he had zero interest in riding what was so obviously "a gull's bike." Fine.
by James Gleick, New York Times
What is Magna Carta worth? Exactly $21,321,000. We know because that's what it fetched in a fair public auction at Sotheby's in New York just before Christmas. Twenty-one million is, by far, the most ever pad for a page of text, and therein lies a paradox: Information is now cheaper than ever and also more expensive.
by Tariq Ramadan, New York Times
The Koran may be read at several levels, in quite distinct fields.
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, New York Times
Several authors have published books on radical Islam's threat to the West since that shocking morning in September six years ago. With "The Suicide of Reason," Lee Harris joins their ranks. But he distinguishes himself by going further than most of his counterparts: he considers the very worst possibility — the destruction of the West by radical Islam.
by Lindsay Minnema, Washington Post
Some research suggests illness goes up when the stress of work goes down. Skeptics are immune to this theory.
by Richard B. McKenzie, Wall Street Journal
An economist explains his weight-loss plan.
by Wayne Curtis, New York Times
Congratulations on selecting seat 21C! This manual is intended to familiarize you with the many options available to you.
by Robin Givhan, Washington Post
So does objectifying a man disminish him? And if it does, is that worth applauding because it means the playing field has been leveled a bit?
by Blake Morrison, Guardian
The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides.
by Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times
Small places often prove to be the best eating spots in many cities. But for historical reasons Bangkok may boast the finest street food on earth.
by Drew Johnson, Virginia Quarterly Review
by Matthew Taylor, New Statesman
A dangerous gap exists between our personal experience, which is mainly happy, and our view of a society in decline.
by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic
How David Simons's disappointment with the industry that let him down made The Wire the greatest show on television—and why his searing vision shouldn't be confused with reality.
by Tamara Jones, Washington Post
She overcame heartbreak and made a whole lot of dough in pretzels. NowA nne Beiler serves life lessons to others in Pennsylvania's Amish country.
by Lisa Lerer, Slate
Could law firm cliemts finally kill it off?
by Monica Hesse, Washington Post
With such ridiculously miserable rates of achievement, the logical question to ask isn't how we can better reach our goals, but: Why do we even bother making them to begin with? Are we just hopelessly stupid?
by Simon Garfield, Guardian
Launched in 1979 under the inspired lunacy' of Bill Buford, Granta magazine became the home of vital new writing and launched the careers of some of our greatest novelists. As it celebrates its 100th issue, we ask editors past and present how a tiny Cambridge journal rose to conquer the literary world.
by Harold McGee, New York Times
Of all the ingredients in the kitchen, the most common is also the most mysterious.
It's hard to measure and hard to control. It's not a material like water or flour, to be added by the cup. In fact, it's invisible.
It's heat.
by Ginger Strand, The Believer
Feminity, Niagara Falls, and the genuine allure of an American fake.
by Sharon Olds, New Yorker
by Cornelius Eady, New Yorker
The town near our house
Isn't fancy, but it is ripe.
At present, it is still on
The wrong side of
The Hudson River.
by John Updike, New Yorker
by Edward Cody, Washington Post
The party's Central Committee in 2001 urged Chinese media and journalism schools to adopt the concept of "Marxist journalism." The term was broadly interpreted to mean journalism that the government views as improving society and taking account of Chinese realities, including censorship under one-party rule.
by James Randerson, The Guardian
The changes of mind that gave philosophers and scientists new insights.
by Sam Roberts, New York Times
Most writers remember exactly how they they met David Smith.
by John Tierney, New York Times
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what's called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds.
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