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by David Cole, New York Review Of Books
America's experiment with torture presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult challenges: how should the nation account for the abuses that have occurred in the past, what are the appropriate remedies, and how can we ensure that such abuses not happen again?
by Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine
Tony Blair was both Britain's Obama, transforming its politics, and Britain's Bush, prosecuting a deeply unpopular war. But at Yale last semester, as he moved into his afterlife, he seemed oddly unencumbered by his past.
by Mssv
The situation is undeniably bad. What's going to happen next?
by Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist
If the loop quantum cosmology (LQC) theory turns out to be right, our universe emerged from a pre-existing universe that had been expanding before contracting due to gravity. As all the matter squeezed into a microscopic volume, this universe approahced the so-called Planck density. At this stage, it stopped contracting and rebounded, giving us our univese.
by Robert Pinsky, Slate
Thomas Hardy's timely meditation on the turning of an era.
by John Schwartz, New York Times
Is the next generation of spacecraft fundamentally flawed? Or are the troubles routine?
by Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
A comic-book series' special character has helped define a writer who brought new ambition to a pop medium.
by Julian Barnes, New Yorker
by David Patrick Stearns, Obit
Bernstein and Williams: Similar lives, different legacies.
by Lisa Reed, New York Times
A mother and her son retrace a visit to the Indonesian island, finding worldly comfort on a coffe plantation and spiritual calm at sunrise in an ancient temple.
by Peter Applebome, New York Times
Before we toss the latest unopened 401(k) statement into the trash, a year-end toast to us all — the boobs and easy marks who from time immemorial have mastered the art of bying high and selling low, investing in bubbles as transparent as an open window, making crashes and swindles as much a part of the human experience as love, vanity and bad breath.
by Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
The looking-glass, closed to traffic.
by The Economist
A Tintin blockbuster is on the way. Baffled Americans hoping to understand him should look at him through the prism of post-war Europe.
by Jincy Willett, New York Times
A first novel takes a brilliant, troubled and terribly young mathematician off to college and back.
by James Panero, New York Times
"Street Gang: The Complete History of 'Sesame Street,'" by Michael Davis, a former columnist for TV Guide, now offers the behind-the-lens story, the first comprehensive account, of this 39-year-old show.
by David Carr, New York Times
Michael Wolff attacks Rupert Murdoch with casual delight in this portrait of the media titan and his quest to buy the Wall Street Journal.
by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, Reason Magazine
Despie all leading indicators to the contrary, America is poised to enter a new age of freedom.
by Joyce Wadler, New York Times
The rules of re-gifting are but simple common sense.
by Dwight Garner, New York Times
There is little doubt that Elizabeth Alexander's verse will be broadcast to more people at one time than any poem ever composed.
by Christopher Caldwell, Weekly Standard
Time has killed off a lot of modernist art. But the architectural remnants of the age cannot be avoided.
by Gemma Soames, The Times
Yes, you can wear lipstick and be a feminist. The F word is being rebranded.
by Roy Blount Jr., New York Times
Let's digress from anything ending in -ession. Let's entertain some new, upbead holiday words.
by Sarah Yall, New York Times
It was not that its products were particularly exciting in themselves, or that its service was particularly attentive. But Woolworths was always there, a comforting part of the landscape, offering everything you wanted and more besides: ice trays and ironing boards; birthday cards and bars of soap; Play-Doh, pet food, paper clips and pajamas.
by Vincent Carroll, Wall Street Journal
How secular newsrooms handle stories with a religious component.
by Jason Boog, Salon
The economic news couldn't be worse for the book industry. Now insiders are asking how literature will survive.
by Michael Kenney, Boston Globe
On recently revisiting "A Christmas Carol" - virtually a first reading after so many years — it was striking to find how early it is in the tale tht Charles Dickens telegraphs his message.
by Daniel Engber, Slate
It's time to get rid of a meaningless number.
by Katharine Miezkowski, Salon
According to the new science of loneliness, those holiday blues have an important message for you.
by Tom Chatfield, Prospect
Prizes are a vital part of the modern market for serious literature, but they're also increasingly flawed and compromised. At their best, however, they can still be an important mechanism for ensuring literature's future as a public art.
by Henry Alford, New York Times
We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books.
by Maria Russo, New York Times
To the list of fiction-writing British explorers of the modern feminine condition add Patricia Ferguson, a former nurse and midwife whose sixth book, "Peripheral Vision," is both cheerful and emotionally wrenching.
by Erica Wagner, New York Times
This is a novel about loss and healing; a novel that acknowledges the depth of loss and the limits of healing.
by Mary Roach, New York Times
Every time we go, I peel off to indulge a luxury I will never give up: a single Kumamoto oyster, $1.75, shucked on the spot, at Rudy Figueroa's little altar of ice chips.
by Matt Gross, New York Times
No one likes to eat in airports, but eat in airports we must.
by Craig Robinson, Time
Your ball, Mr President. I know you're going to drain the big shots.
by The Economist
What appetite drives the proliferation of music to the point where the average American teenager spends 1½-2½ hours a day—an eight of his waking life—listening to it?
by Cindy Price, New York Times
For the holiday season, many amusment parks dress up, slow down and attract a different crowd than thrill-seeking teenagers.
by Theo Hobson, Open Democracy
If we are to honour Milton on his 400th birthday we must clealry recognise the persistence of his otherness - the fact that he cannot be claimed as a noble exemplar of the national soul. The nation chose against him, and still does.
by Steven Cramer, Slate
by Kenan Malik, Spiked
Twenty years later, the Rushdie Affair seems equally like a conflict from a different age - but for the opposite reason. Not only have the issues that it raised - the nature of Islam, and its relationship to the West; the meaning of multiculturalism; the boundaries of tolerance in a liberal society; the limits of free speech in a plural world - become some of the defining problems of the age. But the politics of the pre-Rushdie age are now what seems anomalous.
by Dana Scarton, New York Times
The pinkie, the humble fifth finger, has long been viwed as a decorative accessory, something to extend daintily from a wine glass. So what would you lose if you didn't have one?
by Bina Venkataraman, New York Times
For Dr. Fridrich, tackling an impossible puzzle is not a hobby, and the Rubik's Cube is not simply a game. They are obsessions.
by Gary Kamiya, Salon
Mole, Rat, Toad and Badget kept me up late reading as a kid. Now I love Kenneth Grahame's classic even more.
by Mark Bittman, New York Times
I'm here to help you feel better.
by Bruce Fleming, Chronicle Of Higher Education
The good news is that we've created a discipline: literary studies. The bad news is that we've made ourselves rulers of a realm that has separated itself almost completely from the rest of the world.
by Dwight Garner, New York Times
Fair readers, hail! Now here's a teaser:
Who's this pale, familiar geezer
Appearing through the mists of time
Atop a tow'r of creaky rhyme?
With those lines in this week's issue of The New Yorker magazine, Roger Ngell introduces himself — or, rather, reintroduces himself — at the start of a page-long holiday poem titled "Greetings, Friends!"
by Arthur Vogelsang, New Yorker
by Dan Chiasson, New Yorker
by Roger Angell, New Yorker
by Joy Press, Salon
Yesterday I did something that made me feel sickened and confused: I went Christmas shopping.
by T.M. Shine, Washington Post
Ever feel lost in a maze of too many options? Here's how one man let indecision be his friend.
by Justin Fox, Time
"Shall we call it a depression now?"
by Nick Laird, New York Times
It was on the volcanic island of Santorini, in a whitewashed restaurant perched on the clifftop with views across the lagoon and out to the vast horizon, that I encountered a Roquefort salad.
by Joanne Kaufman, New York Times
What happens when there is more drama in the book club than there is in the books?
by Michael Dickman, New Yorker
by Jonathan Aaron, New Yorker
by Steven Lenzner, Weekly Standard
The uses and abuss of science in political life.
by Wells Tower, Washington Post
If its absurdist twists and wicked parodies of conventional journalism are just a joke, the country's leading satirical newspaper is having the last laugh.
by T. Susan Chang, Boston Globe
Jennifer McLagan's cookbooks are joyously contrarian affairs. In 2005, she published the finger-licking and terrific "Bones." Now she has "Fat." This is no quick-and-easy book featuring chicken cutlets with breakfast cereal "crust." It's a rollicking journey through the kingdom of unrepentant, glorious, and filthy rich fat.
by Matthew DeBord, Los Angeles Times
You could say this book is a blistering stream of witty comments, or a dazzling romp through the experiences of a woman who once sought drug-addiction counsel from Cary Grant. But it isn't really about any of that. It's about the dizzying, dissonant music of Carrie Fisher's existence.
by Hannah Edelstein, The Guardian
Writing rejection letters is a delicate skill, one that must be fine-tuned over time (weeks, even) as one digs out from under the slush pile. For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomlished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again.
by Carolyn Omine, Los Angeles Times
Being a Simpsons writer is hard work—unless you're a genius.
by Christopher Ketcham, Vanity Fair
When her son was sentenced to 25 years for Brooklyn's 2003 "grid kid" slaying, Doreen Quinn Giuliano was sure he'd been wrongfully convicted. To prove it, she went undercover, testing her sanity, her marriage, and the justice system. It was a desperate move—and it may have worked.
by Maureen Dowd, Vanity Fair
Tina Fey has rules. They've guided the 38-year-old writer-comedian through marriage, motherhood, and a career that went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation, boosting the ratings of both Saturday Night Live and her own NBC show, 30 Rock.
by Rita Dove, Slate
by Amos Oz, New Yorker
by Bob Hicok, New Yorker
by Richard Wilbur, New Yorker
by Cynthia Crossen, Wall Street Journal
My self-imposed challenge this week was to save money by reading a book that I own but have never read.
There were a shocking number of candidates for this challenge - books I had bought impulsively, gifts from well-meaning (or not) friends and relatives and books whose provenance has long been lost to history.
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