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by Laura Miller, New York Times
As long as I have a few unread books beckoning to me from across the room, I tell myself I can always find a little more time.
by James Gleick, New York Times
Publishers may or may not figure out how to make moey again, but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.
by Alex Williams, New York Times
"The thing about the recession is, it takes the pressure off," said David Monn, the celebrated New York event planner. "It allows you to strip away all the stuff that's not important and focus on what is: friends, family, togetherness." (And potatoes, it turns out; but more about that later.)
by Tom Bissell, New York Times
Suicide is an exploded bridge that can never be repaired. All its secondary victims can do is stare across the chasm and hope the other side is more peaceful than this one.
by Tim Harford, Slate
Why it's so hard to predict how bad the recession will be.
by Dave Barry, Washington Post
Why do we give gifts during the holiday season? We do it for a reason that is as timeless as humanity itself: women.
by Andrew Stark, Wall Street Journal
Pondering what it means to be alone in the modern world.
by Peter Bebergal, Boston Globe
Yes, "Anathem," Neal Stephenson's new novel is very long, coming in at more than 900 pages. Yes, it tackles philosophy, physics, religion, and mathematics. Yes, it's a daring feat of speculative fiction, playing with all the classic science-fiction tropes: futurism, first contact, high tech versus low tech, and speculations on the nature of the cosmos. And yes, it's pretty good, almost great, despite the work involved in reading it.
by Alex Witchel, New York Times
Macaroni and cheese with Humboldt Fog, a high-end goat cheese from Northern California, is savory without being acrid, and creamy without being heavy.
by Mervyn Rothstein, New York Times
For Maria Balinska, it was never just bagels and yuks. "People used to laugh at me when I told them I was writing a book about bagels," she said. "I'd tell them It was actually quite serious."
by Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine
Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of lonelines researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.
by Regina Schrambling, Slate
Why food writers secretly hate the November feast.
by David Ferry, Slate
by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon
A troubling surge in creepy "upskirt" photography has lawmakers in a twist — and the body parts of women posted all over the internet.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.
by Steven Erlanger, New York Times
The impression is that business is bad and getting worse, with people and companies cutting back on discretionary spending and entertainment budgets. And that is only compounding longer-term problems stemming from changes in how people live and growing health concerns.
by Stanley Moss, New Yorker
by Daniyal Mueenuddin, New Yorker
by Clive James, New Yorker
by Marianne Jacobbi, Boston Globe
No piece of clothing is as cloaked in history and dreams as the wedding dress.
by Andy Newman, New York Times
Pity poor irony. Declared dead after 9/11, it staged a strong rally beneath a "Mission Accomplished banner, only to find itself in mortal danger once again.
by Paul Shaw, AIGA
There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway syste, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true.
by Ross Simonini, New York Times
Avant-grade literature gave America its first tradition of subverting narrative, but what was once a wild experiment in language has become an accepted counterpart to our internet culture, where digressive Googling and link-clicking are a way of life. The dustry sitcom has caught up to the modern mind.
by Michael Dirda, New York Review Of Books
Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear. While Paul Auster may not have a glittering eye, he still knows how to keep a reader spellbound.
by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle Of Higher Education
When Richard J. DuRocher, a professor English at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn., told one of his classes that he was running a marathon, everybody cheered. Then he told them what kind of marathon: a straight-through, out-loud reading of John ilton's Paradise Lost — all 12 books of it, from Satan's fall to Adam and Eve's eviction from the Garden of Eden.
by David Propson, Wall Street Journal
'Pedestrianism' as a method of discovering the world.
by Roger Ebert, Chicaco Sun-Times
At Pritikin they have a truism: "If you don't die of anything else, sooner or later you will die of caner." We all nod thoughtfully.
by Joan Acocella, New Yorker
The rise of overparenting.
by Piotr Florczyk, Slate
by Carolyn Porco, Scientific American
Wrinkled landscapes and spouting jets on Saturn's sixth-largest moon hint at underground waters.
by Susan Dominus, New York Times
Everyone's a critic, and apparntly it's never too soon to start. That's why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out for dinner one night last week.
by Calvin Trillin, New Yorker
The best Texas BBQ in the world.
by Rita Dove, New Yorker
by Edwidge Danticat, New Yorker
by Charles Simic, New Yorker
by Louis Bayard, Salon
Bill Gates and the Beatles owe their genius to nurture not nature, argues the acclaimed "Tipping Point" author. It's a nice theory.
by Joe Queenan, New York Times
Forget unfair negative reviews. The real problem is the unfair positive ones.
by Daniel B. Smith, New York Times
The poet, philosopher, translator and scholar Lewis Hyde has spent his life trying to figure that out — and become a literary cult figure in the process.
by Jack Shafer, New York Times
Roy Blount Jr. has returned from the fileds where the American lingo grows wild to write "Alphabet Juice," his personal lexicon, usage manual, writers' guidebook, etymological investigation and literary junk drawer.
by P.J. O'Rourke, Weekly Standard
Let us bend over the kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone—gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.
by Richard Thompson Ford, Slate
Racism is the wrong frame for understanding the passage of California's same-sex marriage ban.
by Charles Mcgrath, New York Times
Asked if after 30 years he finally had "Shadow Country" in the shape he wanted, Mr. Matthiessen laughted and threatened to rewrite it all over again.
by Richard Eder, New York Times
Mr Saramago, one of the last of the old-line Communists, has written an atheist's religious parable; a story abounding in sentiment and purged of it.
by Heng-Cheong Leong, MyAppleMenu
Updates will be minimal until 15 Dec 2008, due to my a) going on a holiday, b) work commitment, and c) reservist duties; not concurrently, and not necessary in that order. :-)
by Judith Kane Jeanson, Los Angeles Times
"Most people choose the bagel they grew up with," says Richard Friedman, and for most Southern Californians, whether they know it or not, that means the choice is bagels made either by Friedman or his oldest competitor.
by Debbie Nathan, New York Magazine
In bailarina bars, you can rent a girlfriend by the song. For $40, she'll sit with you for an hour. For $500, she's yours for the evening. That's when the relationship gets complicated.
by Jaason Zengerie, New York Magazine
Malcolm Gladwell's elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwelian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.
by Keith Phipps, Slate
That's sort of what watching How the West Was Won is like.
by Dave Itzkoff, New York Times
What fans expected from Mr. Crichton wsa his honoring the unspoken understanding that exists between readers and writers and speculative fiction: the reader will suspend disbelief as long as the writer start with basic scientific fact before weaving his science fiction. With these last two novels, they concluded that Mr. Crichton, in his warnings of perilous futures, had violated the pact.
by Adam Harrison Levy, Design Observer
Devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city.
by Henry Alford, New York Times
I have become more explicit in my acts of reverse etiquette.
by Robert Wrigley, New Yorker
by Jonathan Lethem, New Yorker
by C. K. Williams, New Yorker
by Theodore Dalyrmple, New English Review
The pleasure of second-hand bokshops is not only in finding what you wnat: it is in leafing through many volumes and alighting upon something that you never knew existed, that fascinates you and therefore widens your horizons in a completely unanticipated way, helping you to make sthe most unexpected connections.
by Avis Thomas-Lester and Lori Aratani, Washington Post
President-elect Barack Obama hadn't left the stage at Chicago's Grant Park on Tuesday night when telephones started jingling across the Washington area. America, apparently, is looking for a place to crash.
by Alexander Aciman, New York Times
Metropolis and world capital by day, the city by night is an Art Deco treasure that exists most powerfully in detective movies of previous decades. Even in the town celebrated for insomnia and vivcity, there exists a spooky, eerie element that haunts the streets at night.
by David Grann, New Yorker
John McCain's choices.
by Elizabeth Royte, New York Times
"Alex & Me," Irene Pepperberg's memoir of her 30-year scientific collaboration with an African gray parrot, was written for the legions of Alex's fans, the (probably) millions whose lives he and she touched with their groundbreaking work on nonhuman communication.
by Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times
The emergence of China's titanic manufacturing base has been chronicled in numerous books and articles in recent years, but Leslie Chang has elected to focus not on the broader market forces at play but on the individuals, most of them women, who leave their villages and sek their fortunes on the front lines of this economy.
by A. O. Scott, New York Times
A single John Leonard sentence is, more often than not, an unmatchable catalog of learning, wit, enthusiasm and combativeness, and by the time Mr Leonard died on Wednesday, tose sentences surely numbered in the millions.
by John Zogby, Forbes
Once again, history is not kind to the soldiers of America's least popular and most divisive war. This election may have closed the book on a Vietnam veteran ever being elected president.
by Robert Kolker, New York Magazine
Pro-life zealot James Kopp murdered an upstte abrotion doctor in 1998. nd he might well have escaped the FBI if not for an informant whose desire for the big reward money led him to betray a lifelong friend.
by Seth Mnookin, Vanity Fair
The Times is being whipsawed by the same economic woes battering the rest of the industry. But unlike virtually every other news organization on the planet, it has not significantly cut back on the number of staff in has on the ground in Iraq, a commitment which costs upwards of $3 million a year. "You can't cover a story only when interest peaks," says Bill Keller, the paper's executive editor. "You have to walk the beat all the time. This is so integral to what readers expect in The New York Times that if we stopped covering the war in Iraq we should just go out of business."
by Chris Colin, New York Times
Before becoming first-time parents, a couple takes a vacation with old friends to Monte Rio, Calif., a laid-back enclave of misty redwoods in Sonoma County.
by John M. Broder, New York Times
Rahm Emanuel, who will leave his family in Chicago and commute whenever he can, is the latest political appointee to face the question.
by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, Reason Magazine
THe TV show that won the Cold War.
by Allison Samuels, Newsweek
Forget Claire Huxtable. She could be a real-life role model for black women.
by Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Can good writers write short?
C'mon - can fish swim?
Example:
Not Quite What I Was Planning.
It's a collection of six-word memoirs.
by Janet Maslin, New York Times
Stephen King's introductio explains that his new surge of short-story writing was prompted by the job of editing the 2006 volume in the Best American Short Stories series. He wondered whether he stil had the knack of miniaturiaztion and decided to find out. And simple, everyday situations became his open portals to fantasy and horror.
by Edward Rothstein, New York Times
After the events of the last century, can anyone fully believe that the state should be the ultimate standard for trust and fiscal faith? And would even a real-life George Bailey be able to coax us into confidence, let alone belief that good intentions have power over principles of finance?
by Ben Westhoff, City Pages
The publisher is a thousand miles from NYC but remains one of the best.
by Charles McGrath, New York Times
Charolyn Chute, whose fourth novel, "The School on Heart's Content Road," comes out on Firday, splits time at her rural Maine compound between writing and running her "no-wing" militia.
by Thomas Schaller, Salon
For the past eight years, Jon Stewart, Tina Fey and other comedians have had us laughing through our tears. If Obama wins, will the laughter die?
by Wells Tower, New Yorker
by Rae Armantrout, New Yorker
by Jack Gilbert, New Yorker
by Eamon Grennan, New Yorker
by Daniel Krieger, New York Times
I'd gone into the dark woods of Central Park on the well-lighted 72nd Street Park Drive an upstanding citizen, trying to reduce my carbon footprint while getting some exercise and saving a few dollars. Next thing I knew, one of New York's finest was threatening arrest, drawing me into the labyrinth of the city's criminal justice system.
by Charles McGrath, New York Times
One author argues that some of us are just not college material. Another, that colleges should just stick to the basics.
by Ian Buruma, New York Review Of Books
Naipaul's literary discovery of the world is marked by the way he uses his eyes and ears. These observations are filtered through a mind that is alert, never sentimental, and deeply suspicious of romantic cant.
by Jon Meacham, New York Times
You can tell a lot about a president — or a presidential canddiate — by what he reads, or says he reads.
by Susan Dominus, New York Times
Lauren Zalaznick, the head of the Bravo network, has taken her own elite, urban, downtown sensibilities and brought it into America's living rooms.
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