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by Jonathan Shaw and Jennifer Carling, Harvard Magazine
The cosmic drama, as seen from a vantage in space.
by T. Coraghessan Boyle, New Yorker
by Maureen N. McLane, New Yorker
by Jack Gilbert, New Yorker
by Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
At the end, we are sadder and wiser, and yet somehow comforted too — signs that we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller.
by Mary Beard, New York Review Of Books
Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific.
by Shira Springer, Boston Globe
WHen amputee athletes compete against able-bodied athletes, they're called courageous. But when they nearly win, they are accused of cheating.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, Washington Post
You can't help but marvel at the passage of time, all these generations.
by Mark Sarvas, New York Times
Considering the ubiquity of the work experience in American lives, and the thousands upon thousands of novels published annually, perhaps the question shouldn't be why there are two work-related novels right now but why there aren't many more.
by Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal
Accents, dialects, slang and how we got from King James to hip-hop swagger.
by Mara Hvistendahl, The New Republic
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It's true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.
(Paragraph Two: Four errors. "They" have no antecedent; should read "publishers." "Copy editors" is two words. The phrase "I, for one," needs two added commas.)
by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times
Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father's baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.
by William Saletan, Slate
A genetic theory of homosexuality.
by David Hochman, New York Times
As tea services go, the one at Royal/T here is definitely of the down-the-rabbit-hole variety. In an industrial-chic cafe surrounded by Japanese pop art, an American woman dressed as an English maid recently served French tea in a style that was straight out of Toyko.
by Andrew J. Nathan, The New Republic
What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China.
by Roberta Kwok, Salon
Many of us now count "food miles." But local fruits and veggies may not be more carbon-friendly than produce at the supermarket.
by Adrienne So, Slate
Harnessing the untapped power of breast motion.
by Brian Palmer, Slate
The stories behind "Chicken Without Sexual Life" and "Bean Curd Made by a Pockmarked Woman."
by John M. Glionnna, Los Angeles Times
In Asian cuisine, live fish are a delicacy. Asian diners insist they can distinguish on the plate between a fish freshly plucked from a tank or stream and one previously gutted and languishing on ice.
by Karl Kirchwey, New Yorker
by Atul Gawande, New Yorker
Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.
by Robin McKie, The Guardian
It's 150 years since Darwin made one of the most significant breakthroughs in scientific history - the theory of natural selection. But if it hadn't been for a young ornithologist on the other side of the world, his seminal work might never have appeared.
by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Times
What may, in fact, be most revealing about McClellan's book is not what it discloses about the head of state, but what it says about the continuing devaluation of the political memoir as a literary form. Pradoxical though it may seem, even as these books have become more accusatory, they have also become less illuminating.
by Elmer Kelton, Texas Monthly
To me, the word "Cowboy" calls to mind a long and noble tradition of hard work and honesty. But every time I turn on the news, I hear it thrown around as a pejorative, hijacked by pundits and politicians to refer to arrogant, reckless types who go it alone and break all the rules. If any ot these folks had ever spent a day with my father on the McElroy Ranch—or with the thousands of working cowboys in Texas—they might have a different idea.
by Paul Collins, Slate
Has modern life killed the semicolon?
by Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times
Pumping Chinese dishes through a computer translator can create some strange results, but translation has always been more an art than a science. Of course, machine translation + human error can create even more bizarre results.
by Jane Black, Washington Post
In my fantasy, I enter a restaurant, order and sweetly ask the waiter if I can "hold on to the menu" during dinner. Then, using a distinctive purple pen, I discreetly copy-edit the descriptions of the dishes.
by Mary Lynas, The Guardian
Not being a scientist is a help rather than a hindrance when it comes to communicating - with the necessary passion - the findings of scientific research.
by Paul Constant, The Stranger
Can a filthy, filthy German give sex writing a kick in the pants?
by Paul Constant, The Stranger
On the demented, celebrity-crazed, surrdner-happy, endlessly-on-the-verge-of-being-wiped-off-the-planet publishing industry. (Note to panicked book lovers: Everything is going to be okay.)
by Susannah Felts, Please Don't
by Judith B. Walzer, Dissent
Feminist criticism as these four writers practice it returs us (or should have) to one of the basic purposes of criticism—to have and defend a reasoned, coherent point of view.
by Kenneth Ringle, European Affairs
If Washington seems disappointing as a modern urban center (and perhaps to some European vistors as a national capital), it is not all L'Enfant's fault. In his fascinatingly vivid account of the city's first planner and his modern legacy, Scott Berg, a Pulizer prize-winning biographer and historian of the American heritage, shows that L'Enfant designed a substantially more libable national capital than the one the nation has ended up with.
by Rebecca McClanahan, Brevity 27
by Eamon Grennan, Slate
by Alex Wright, New York Times
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New Yorker
by Kevin Young, New Yorker
by J. D. McClatchy, New Yorker
by Laura Miller, New York Times
Leonard Marcus's "Minder of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneuers, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature" is the story of the apparatus that conjured such readers into existence: the children's librarian who chose to order "The Hobbit"; the publisher (Houghton Mifflin, Marcus's own) who brought it to market, the stores that were out of stock (possibly because of paper shortages). He even has a few words for the parents who, in the mid-20th century, increasingly saw boks as an investment in their children's future.
by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.
by Sara Wheeler, The Guardian
Julian Evans's Semi-Invisible Man reveals that an unerring eye for the telling detail made Norman Lewis a writer of genius.
by Georgina Ferry, The Guardian
What is a beautiful experiment? Conventional aesthetics has little to do with it.
by Lisa Belkin, New York Times
They would not be the kind of parents their parents had been - the mother-knows-best mold. Nor the kind their friends were — the "involved" dad married to the stressed-out working mom. Nor even, as Marc put it, "the stay-at-home dad, who is cooed at for his sensitivity but who is as isolated and financially vulnerable as the stay-at-home-mom."
Instead, they would create their own model, on ein which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers.
by Matthew Forney, New York Times
In Beijing, where my family lives, I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-friend scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son's cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.
"Scorpions!" shrieked my son, Roy. "Awesome!"
by Francois Cusset, Chronicle Of Higher Education
In fact, if there is a future for theory, it will start on the campus, provided it doesn't die there. But theory may even find a suitable nesting place there; for now that its passions and controversies are over, now that it has been quietly normalized and institutionalized, it may finally be possible to treat it with a historical approach, a colder eye, rather than with the jargon-filled, decontextualized approach that has been a leading narrative of theory in the United States.
by Peter Balakian, Slate
by Ulrike Knofel, Salon
A building frenzy is raging in Asia, Russia and the Persian Gulf. And cities like New York don't have the money to compete. Will the West soon look outdated?
by Michael Kinsley, Slate
My first day on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Mich., the chief copy editor said something that has inspired me ever since. "Remember," he said, "every word that you cut saves the publisher money." But like so much else, this principle seems to have been turned upside down by the internet.
by Peter Meehan, New York Times
I spent a few weekends after opening day this year bopping around to 10 American cities, where I ate my way through 12 major league ballparks. My mission: to hoover down a shameful number of hot dogs and to sample the increasingly ambitious and occasionally delicious world of ballpark cuisine beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack.
by Robert McCrum, The Guardian
When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books were in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors, from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, to Anthony Burgess and Clive James. Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink an dpaper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript.
by Karan Mahajan, San Francisco Chronicle
Joan Silber's beautiful new novel is called "The Size of the World," but thankfully it makes no attempt to ccount for the world's bigness with its page count. It is instead a marvel of compression - a mere 320 pages even as it spans several continents and lifetimes.
by Roger Scruton, City Journal
American visitors to Paris, Rome, Prague, or Barcelona, comparing what they see with what is familiar from their own continent, will recognize how careless their countrymen often have been in their attempts to create cities. But the American who leaves the routes prescribed by the Ministries of Tourism will quickly see that Paris is miraculous in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it.
by George Johnson, New York Times
State lotteries, it's sometimes said, are a tax on people who don't understand mathematics. But there is no cause for anyone to feel smug.
by Yiyun Li, San Francisco Chronicle
Good and evil, black and white, never make for memorable characters. It is the gray banding the nature of every human that makes me still wonder, from time to time, about the people, anonymous or apparent, operating the machine of censorship.
by Guardian
by Hamutal Bar-Yosef, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back, Guernica
by Jonathan Eig, Wall Street Journal
We'll always have Walley World.
by Michelle Slatalla, New York Times
Buy food online to eat locally? It sounded unnatural, or at least counterintuitive. But the phenomenon is growing nationwide.
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
In these stories, food has the power to define characters, propel plots, cause riots and even commit manslaughter.
by Jane Hirshfield, The Atlantic
by Christian Demand, Signandsight
Most texts which accompany contemporary art production are so twisted and woolly that they could easily pass for self-parody.
by Sarah M. Broom, Oxford American
We stood facing a fifty-foot-long burrow int he ground beginning near the curb and running, shadowlike, the length of where the house used to be. My friend asked where certain rooms were, where Ivory and my banjo-playing dad, Simon, once slept. I tried to pinpoint them, but found myself confused.
by Amanda Fortini, New York Magazine
Since so many researchers argue that breakfast does matter, I began to investigate.
by Joe Wilkins, Slate
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is dirving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand wy it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars' worth of telescope time.
by Luc Sante, Wall Street Journal
Why it's so hard to let go of books in a language I can't read... or duplicate copies of 'True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality'... or Tijuana sailors' pornography...
by Michael Dirda, Washington Post
The title alone summons visions of exceedingly ambitious sexual postures. Yet the real Kamasutra is even more fascinating than its myth.
by Gerald Stern, New Yorker
by Philip Levine, New Yorker
by Danielle Drellinger, Boston Globe
Writers and coffee go together like deadlines and trying to avoid starting your article with a cliche.
by Steve Almond, Boston Globe
The novelist John Gardner claimed there are two basic plots in fiction: someone goes on a trip, or a stranger comes to town. Salman Rushdie's "Enchantress of Florence" opens with a stranger coming to town, and ends with the same fellow heading off on a trip.
by Benjamin J. Romano, Seattle Times
Behind a chalk line on a dustry road int he igh valley east of Snoqualmie Pass, 93 extraordinarily fit humans are making final preparations for a 100-mile journey through lush Cascade forests, rock, wind-swept ridges, slick, ankle-twisting ravines, rain, darkness and extreme fatigue.
by Bruce Wallace, Los Angeles Times
The Japanese have perfected the art of obsession. Japan, after all, is the place that gave us otaku, that wonderfully elastic word that refers to people obsessed to distraction with the details of a single thing.
by Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times
"You were oxygen-deprived. You should try that sometime with a bottle of O2," he said. "Take on breath and the stars just"—he reached out as if grabbing teh sky and drawing it to his face—"whoop, leap out at you."
Oh yeah, I thought. I've got to try that.
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