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by Jordan Ellenberg, Slate
Why your ballot isn't as meaningless as you think.
by Brain Turner, Virginia Quarterly Review
by Catherine O'Flynn, Granta
I sneer also at the two-dimensionality of maps. The missing third dimension of depth is less debilitating than the missing fourth of time.
by Sarah Kershaw, New York Times
Ugliness has recently emerged as a serious subject of study and academic interest unto itself, in some small part because of the success of television's "Ugly Betty," which ABC promoted with a "Be Ugly" campaign stressing self-esteem for girls and young women.
by Rebecca Traister, Salon
Call it historical accident or mere coincidence, but this election, built as it has been around two history-making female candidates, traditional "women's issues" like the economy and healthcare and the acknowledgment of the power of the female voters, also happens to have been translated, interpreted and picked apart by women newscaters. And that's something new.
by David M. Shribman, Boston Globe
Sarah Lyall is a witty American married to an Englishman. She has the access afforded to a New York Times foreign correspondent and the deft hand of a portraitist. "The Anglo Files," her field guide to the British, treats the folks ont he other side of the "special relationship" as if she were an anthropologist and they a bizarre subcult requiring scholarly explanation.
by Alberto Manguel, New York Sun
Barely nine pages long, "The Library of Babel" is nothing less than an attempt to describe the chaotic order and meaning of the universe, buidling on the ancient notion of the world as a book (or a book itself divided into an almost infinite number of books) in which we ourselves are written, and which we also attempt to read.
by Abigail Zuger, New York Times
In "Reflections on Doctors," nurses have produced something quite extraordinary in recent medical writings: a compilation of 19 brief essays musing on the current relationship between the species.
by Jesse Green, New York Magazine
For three boys (and their mothers), Billy Elliot is the role of a lifetime. Provided they don't grow out of it too fast.
by Rita Dove, Slate
by Alice Cullina, 2River View
by Louis Bayard, Salon
If nothing else, Margaret Atwood has a gift for timing. Her 1986 futuristic dystopia, "The Handmaid's Tale," arrived at the precise cultural moment when theocracy was starting to look scarier than nuclear holocaust. And her latest work, a book-length essay called "Payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth," comes just as Wall Street is undergoing a holocaust of its own.
by Melanie Berliet, Vanity Fair
Be still, rogue toe. Please! Don't you dare surrender to that muscle cramp. Now is not the time.
by W. S. Merwin, New Yorker
by Louise Erdrich, New Yorker
by Mark Ravenhill, The Guardian
Far better that each generation discovers a fresh Dickensian voice through the novels, than to be haunted by a delivery that would probably seem risbly melodramatic now.
by Natalie Singer, Seattle Times
Starting with homemade costumes and healthier treats for Halloween, a group of moms is banding together to transform holiday rituals - casting off the stuff and bringing back the meaning.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
Why did the post office throw the clock out the window?
by David Kirby, New York Times
People are funny. Words are funnier. And poems, when they're at their smartest and best-made, are funniest of all.
by Jay WInik, New York Times
In his latest book, "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," David S. Reynolds asks us to more carefully consider the brawling, chaotic, boisterous years from 1815 to 1848 as a fascinating age in its own right.
by Bill McKibben, New York Review Of Books
Just as you can't run for commander-in-chief on any platform other than "Our best days are still ahead of us," so you can't run for pundit-n-chief either. But those instincts can get you in trouble.
by Lionel Shriver, Wall Street Journal
QUotation marks have fallen out of favor, and that's bad for books.
by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Let's set aside the economic sound and fury and focus on the writing rather than the noise.
by Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon
With gas prices through the roof, our car-crazy nation showed the love for buses and trains. But there's a glitch.
by Barron YoungSmith, Slate
The case against long-distance relationships.
by Kathleen Hellen, The Cortland Review
by Anna George Meek, Threepenny Review
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
Once, all it took to cook like a chef was the nerve to push a live crayfish through a sieve. Now that the fall publishing season has delivered several hundred pounds of recipes from these international stars of molecular gastronomy, home cooks may want to prepare the kitchen with syringes, soy lecithin and a big bag of hero worship.
by Marc Lacey, New York Times
There is one eatery with a particularly distinguished history that is relevant to the question of whether one should consume salads in Mexico. Called Caesar's Restaurant, it sits int he seediest of spots, along Tijuana's Avenida Revolucion, and specializes in sald — Caesar Salad, to be exact, which it says was invented in its kitchen in 1924.
by Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian
Structure, rhythm, balance... the two art forms are very similar.
by Billy Mills, The Guardian
Open up and share; you're going to enjoy it.
by Steven Pinker, The Atlantic
Why Washington's crusade against swearing on the airwaves is f*cked up.
by Michael J. Socolow, Chronicle Of Higher Education
That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one.
by Chaterine Pierce, Slate
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Telegraph
The centre around which the Victorian age revolved and Dickens's combination of ambition and anxiety make him unmistakably our contemporary. And not only can we find parallels in his novels with the current crisis, we can also learn from them how to survive and triumph over it.
by Mindy Farabee, Los Angeles Times
The Thing is not your garden-variety periodical. Putting a spin on the idea of text messaging, the Thing is by turns a window shade, a baseball cap, a set of coasters and a hunk of rubber. That last issue puts the lie to those glossy fall fashion magazines that could double as doorstops. It is a doorstop.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
Is it the hrror or the beauty that makes science cool?
by Michael Shae, New York Times
Such a litany of negatives may be presumed to create a sense of unease, if not a downright bad conscience, among those who take pleasure, guilty or not, in eating beef. Both Betty Fussell's "Raising Steaks" and Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser's "Beef" hold fast to th ecause, but both are shadowed by an anxiety that an ancient pleasure may come to be shunned out of fear and disapproval — an anxiety that causes them to rise at times to distinctly overheated defense.
by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times
Perhaps only Christopher Buckley, the novelist, political satirist and son of the conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., would think to quote the queen of England in describing his increasingly complicated life.
by Ruth Padel, New Yorker
by Gerald Stern, New Yorker
by Brian Stelter, New York Times
The series — once renowned for rejuvenating CBS and drawing young viewers to the network — is showing its age. So, too, is the competition-based reality format that has dominated television for nearly a decade.
by Sam Roberts, New York Times
From the earliest urban legends to the latest computer games, Americans have embraced fantasies of the city's destruction as "a reaffirmation of New York's greatness," said Max Page, a professor of history and architecture and the author of a new book called "The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York's Destruction."
by Carol Ann Duffy
by Roger Lowenstein, New York Times
In a sense, the question is whether we want to return to an era of plentiful oil and low prices — assuming it is possible — or to accept that political, geological and possibly environmental limitations will force us to diversify.
by The Economist
What went wrong and, rather more importantly for the future, what did not.
by Dinitia Smith, New York Times
It is something of a surprise nearly 50 years after Emily Post's death to be reminded that there was a real person behind the name that has become synonymous with good manners. And it is to Laura Claridge's credit that she has written the first full biography of Post.
by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic
Airport security in America is a sham—"security theater" designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items.
by Tim Cavanaugh, Reason Magazine
Are the great American habits of directness, foursquare honesty, and a hearty handshake being undermined by fancy-pants French critical theory? You betcha!
by Christopher Beam, Slate
Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, FAIL.
by Verlyn Klinkenborg, photography by Jim Richardson, National Geographic Magazine
In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
by George Gene Gustines, New York Times
If endign up in a station wagon with a pudgy, dwarflike hag doesn't make you want to quit drinking, what will? That is the kind of question, along with wondering how often a man can sink and rebound, that is raised by "The Alcoholic," an engaging graphic novel written by Jonathan Ames and illustrated by Dean Haspiel.
by Florence Fabricant, New York Times
Restaurants that once served two distinct meals a day, lunch and dinner, are acting more like diners, opening early in the morning and keeping their kitchens busy late into the night, and serving in the traditonally slow times between meals.
by John Homans, New York Magazine
Oliver Stone's new film, W., is about a man many would sooner forget — which didn't stop him from making it.
by Joseph Campana, Slate
by Jennifer A. Kingson, New York Times
Survivors of a gory divorce think their stories are the worst of all, and the actor Alec Baldwin is no exception. He may have a bit of a leg to stand on — though Christie Brinkley deserves at least honorable mention — if only for the ugly public spectacle of his custody battle with the actress Kim Basinger.
by Jessica Wapner, New York Times
James W. Pennebaker's interest in word counting began more than 20 years ago, when he did several studies suggesting that people who talked about traumatic experience tended to be physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret.
by John Schwartz, New York Times
Star City has become an important second home for Americans working with their Russian counterparts, and it is about to become more important still.
by Malcom Gladwell, New Yorker
Why do we equate genius with precocity?
by Roddy Doyle, New Yorker
It was the thing he'd always loved about her. The way she could sleep. When they'd just started going with each other, before they really knew each other, he'd lie awake, hoping she'd wake up, praying for it, dying. But even then he'd loved to look at her while she slept. There was something about it that made him feel lucky, or privileged. Or trusted. She could do that beside him, turn everything off, all the defenses, and let him watch her.
by Frederick Seidel, New Yorker
by Donald Hall, New Yorker
by J. R. Moehringer, New York Times
Taking as their inspiration the state guides published by the Federal Writers' Project during and shortly after the Great Depression, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey assembled 50 of America's finest writers and asked them to contribute essays on the same general theme: why my state is special — or not. The result is a funny, moving, rousing collection, greater than the sum of its excellent parts, a convention of literary superdelegates, each one boisterously nominating his or her piece of the Republic.
by Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times
Both in liteature and in life, parrots have been employed to bear false witness.
by Michael O'Donnell, San Francisco Chronicle
This is to be his last book on intellectual property. The field will be worse without him, but any cause would be lucky to gain such a trenchant advocate.
by Lynsey Hanley, The Guardian
The official call for more chatter in libraries is absurd. Silence, too, can be a creative, social glue.
by Paul Wachter, New York Times
In his brief experience, working for tips encouraged selfishness rather than teamwork. Moreover, good service was not always rewarded with a big tip, nor bad service with a poor one. "No other profession works like this," Porter told me, "and I don't see why the restaurant business should either." At his restaurant, Porter and his staff agreed, it no longer would. The Linkery would be more than just a restaurant; it woul dbecome perhaps the nation's only anti-tipping laboratory.
by Paul Greenberg, New York Times
Catfish isn't the first product from Asia to spark emotional trade disputes. But unlike the public hood-bashing that autoworkers dealt an unwitting Japanese car in 1992, what came to be known in the American South as "the catfish wars" simmered out of sight, a resentment that finally boiled up out of the very bottom of America's economy.
by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Overcoming Bias
What does a child need to do - what rules should they follow, how should they behave - to solve an adult problem?
by Adam O'Riordan, The Guardian
Planes are too expensive, cars shouldn't even be considered. Little wonder, then, that the train is the poet's preferred mode of transport.
by Carolyn See, Washington Post
Philip Lopate is such a smart man and such a fine writer that sometimes it's hard to know whether he's gaming you — having fun with you just because he can.
by Theodore Dalrymple, In Character
I am, of course, sorry if you disagree.
by Joshua Foer, Esquire
How much of our humanity are we prepared to cede to machines? This is a dilemma of the future, but it's not much of a concern for Erik Ramsey. Erik can't move. He can't blink his eyes. And he hasn't said a word since 1999. But now, thanks to an electrode that was surgically implanted in his brain and linked to a computer, his nine-year silence is about to end.
by James Wood, New Yorker
The Republican war on words.
by Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times
People always have to eat, but do they have to dine out? That's the question Southern California's top chefs are facing after the last few weeks of grim economic news.
by Benedict Carey, New York Times
The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Wasignton's economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing, according to scientists who study the psychology of forgiveness and retaliation.
by Edward Champion, Los Angeles Times
A posthumous short story collection by a singular science fiction writer.
by Ann Farmer, New York Times
The writer Calvin Trillin's gastronomic walking excursion in Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy is called "Come Hungry" with good reason.
by Sarah Maguire, The Guardian
If we could read the poets that move huge audiences elsewhere in the world, would it wake up our own?
by Yiyun Li, New Yorker
He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that.
by Spencer Reece, New Yorker
by Albert Goldbarth, New Yorker
by Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
There's not a word in English that isn't furled-up history, resonating to some degree withits notorious unfairness and spin.
by Ann Harleman, Boston Globe
The stories in "Yesterday's Weather" offer up surprise after surprise. They're quite short, as short stories go, yet they contain whole worlds inhabited by complex, contradictory characters.
by Steven Millhauser, New York Times
The short story — how modest in bearing!
by Joel Garreau, Washington Post
Doesn't your life seem like a daily adventure in linguistics? Americans today routinely encounter more languages from more continents than at any time in the past century. Whether you're getting a meal or a clean shirt or a cab, or visiting a university or a hospital or simply walking through the mall, it's easy to think you're living in the golden age of language diversity.
by Alastair Harper, The Guardian
I can't help the false romance. It's through different bookshops I've frequented that I can mark out the different moments of my upbringing.
by Louis Bayard, Salon
From miracle diets to creationism to rumors about the origins of 9/11, a new book traces our irrational love of misinformation.
by Roger Kimball, First Things
We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing.
by Stephen Hawking, Cosmos
The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilsation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. But, if the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to go boldly go where no one has gone before.
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