The rise of online reviewing may be toppling the singular critical voice from its pedestal, and with its fall, taste has shattered into a thousand fragments. We are every day sifting through those shards, trying to make meaning of everyone else’s attempt to say what something meant to them.

No mother feels good about getting mad at her kids in public. Losing your temper only makes things worse, and besides, it’s embarrassing to have strangers witness your worst moments of parenting. But in our case, the shame is compounded by the fact that my son is already a visible target, the very sight of his body a red flag for some of the most conflicted bioethical debates of our time.

This is to say that Henry has Down syndrome. I can think of no other bodily condition that triggers such immediate and visceral assumptions about a family’s beliefs, values and quality of life. Seeing a child with Down syndrome invites other people to question the choices that led to his being in the world.

I love her and it’s a secret. I love her so much it kills me, and you bet I’d sooner die than tell her.

As an Italian court prepares to try Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for a second time on charges of killing Meredith Kercher, an expert says a judge failed to grasp the maths of probability involved in the case - and that courts often struggle when it comes to statistics.

To walk into the first few rooms of the exhibition “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,” now at the Metropolitan Museum, is to allow oneself to be immersed in the sweetness of life in the Belle Époque.

In 1950 the thirty-two-year-old tyro poet Muriel Spark drew up a proposal for a “Critical Biography” of Mary Shelley. The project was never going to be easy to sell to publishers. Spark was virtually unknown outside the London poetry scene and, in any case, there was little interest in female novelists of the nineteenth century.

Was a Top Chef cruise worth the possibility of having to pee in the shower and "go number 2 in bags," as I heard a CNBC anchor refer to it? Yes.

Last Saturday marked Record Store Day, a global celebration that encourages folks to head down to their local record store and buy some vinyl. Pleasantly, the initiative has done wonders for local businesses. Besides boosting sales, Record Store Day also offers an invaluable service to writers: It presents us with a peg to hang our "Vinyl is Back!" stories.

Questions of Travel is about uprootedness and travel, about tourism and flight from terror, about the trivial and the terrible.

“After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote. How obvious, one might think. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life.”

A group of students at Cornell, born in Asia but raised in the United States by immigrant parents, were instructed to keep a diary. They struggled to recall the events of their own daily lives when they were later quizzed about them, remembering fewer details about their experiences than their Euro-American counterparts. Qi Wang, the Cornell scholar of “cross-cultural” cognition who conducted the experiment, speculated that Asians were not more forgetful but that they had, perhaps, filtered out the contents of their own stories, deeming them unworthy of being encoded as memories in the first place.

The brilliant essayist already writes for the listener, which makes his new audiobook yet another triumph.

Everyone knows that the Internet has changed how businesses operate, governments function, and people live. But a new, less visible technological trend is just as transformative: “big data.” Big data starts with the fact that there is a lot more information floating around these days than ever before, and it is being put to extraordinary new uses. Big data is distinct from the Internet, although the Web makes it much easier to collect and share data. Big data is about more than just communication: the idea is that we can learn from a large body of information things that we could not comprehend when we used only smaller amounts.

Still, there’s an ancient kinship between chocolate and sex, sired by centuries of misinformation and spread by everyone from Aztec emperors to lip-biting ladies in Peppermint Pattie commercials. I came by it honestly. For me, the affinity between these two pleasures crystallized the first time I loosed an edible penis from a candy mold.

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

It was the quintessential Oprah moment, the kind that made the Book Club thrive and her critics cringe. She was taking a novel about the end of the world, one that includes an image of a baby roasted on a spit, and making it palatable for talk-show television.

It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s “Emma.”

Years ago, I had a writing teacher in college who responded to every paper the same way. “Enjoyed this essay about your cocker spaniel,” she would write at the top, “but I’d like to see the story told from his point of view.” Or, “Excellent screenplay! Now I’m wondering if you could try it as a poem.” Her aim was to open up new territory and truth by reconstructing our writing. Typically, step No. 3 would be to bring the piece back to its original form, incorporating the things we’d learned.

We default to cause-and-effect thinking because we want to maintain control over our lives, but some things just don’t have clear answers.

The big science of building a giant telescope.

“Poor Chicago,” a friend of mine recently said. Given the number of urban apocalypses here, I couldn’t tell which problem she was referring to.

Maybe it’s not the most efficient use of our time, he concedes. But it’s good for the soul to be a producer some of the time, rather than just the consumers our corporate overlords want us to be.

One Wednesday last month, Ann Curry, camouflaged in a hat and trench coat, trudged into the art-deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It had been nine months since she was pushed out as co-host of the “Today” show. Curry was now NBC’s “national and international correspondent” and the anchor at large for “Today,” but these titles seemed honorary. Curry had appeared on “Today” only a handful of times since her ouster. She had no role in NBC’s coverage of election night or Inauguration Day. She taped a few stories for “Rock Center,” the prime-time newsmagazine show, but as she explained on Twitter, her bosses kept rescheduling them. Curry had moved to an office on the 27th floor of 30 Rock, far from her NBC News bosses on the third floor. On this morning, she was at work on a short “NBC Nightly News” segment about the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. It would be only her sixth appearance on the network all year.

I remember sitting in red tights and buckled shoes in my childhood room as my word processor booted up. My father had taught himself DOS programming, and boxy yellow letters blinked on the gray green screen. “THIS IS KATIE RYDER’S WORD PROCESSOR. HELLO KATE.” A system-check flashed through my existing files—“/a_bad_day” (child minimalist), “/last_unicorn” (child plagiarist)—before bringing me to the composition page. My dad’s words changed slightly from week to week by mysterious means; this time, they declared: “YOU’RE READY TO WRITE KATE.”

What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.

Why bother cooking? The reasons to skip it are stacked as high as the microwavable meals in a Costco freezer case. You don’t have time, of course (or you think you don’t); that’s the big one. But you also don’t do it as well as the professionals, so it’s tempting to let them handle it for you. Or at least let them give you a head start in the form of meal-assembly shops, cake mixes, and canned, frozen and pre-chopped ingredients.

Michael Pollan thinks you should bother, and not just as a fashionable exercise in hipsterdom. His latest book, “Cooked,” is a powerful argument for a return to home cooking of the sort that doesn’t begin with an attempt to find the perforated opening.

It's thought-provoking stuff, but Dobelli's argument doesn't stack up. He has chosen the wrong target: it's not news per se that is the problem, but the formats in which we now consume news and the habits of constant interruption and brief attention they generate.

Compared with the hugely popular television series, the book is tough, unapologetic and jittery with anxiety. This makes it a far more accurate representation of Manhattan than the fairytale version presented on HBO.

Everything in your past—and future—is encoded in the digits of pi.

China’s economic boom is driving a culinary revival, as chefs rediscover dishes that haven’t been seen for decades.

One day a couple of years ago, when I found my desk drawer so full of microphone headsets that it would no longer close, I realized it was time for an intervention. I could no longer deny it: I needed to stop reading interviews with authors.

Every liquor store is a fantastical greenhouse, its contents the products of hundreds of plant species.

Can architecture itself be fascist?

The Bosnian has said that he writes "sad books for humorous people" and "humorous books for sad people". The Book of My Lives is a thoughtfully humorous and profoundly sad memoir-cum-collection of essays that explores Hemon's first life, growing up in the lively cultural atmosphere of Sarajevo before the onset of the war in Bosnia, and his second life as a sort of accidental exile in America, where he was effectively trapped in 1992 when the war broke out.

Still, I had to witness the pink clouds for myself. I think of them as pink fairies, ephemeral ambassadors of resilience.

I also witnessed nature bring the best out in everyone. I saw incredible patience, even the from the runners who had to weave and dodge. I encountered endless goodwill, people offering to take pictures or ducking out of someone else's frame.

The taxidermist nodded. Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. "Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don't worry," he said. "It's just the smoke they used to preserve the head."

I must admit, nevertheless, that when you undertake learning Cantonese, you take on quite a challenge; but it's not the language itself - that's dead easy - it is the logistics. Everything is stacked against you.

Truth no longer depended on the prestige, or the intelligence or even the integrity of any one person. That's why Galileo had the last laugh on the inquisitors.

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

Haussmann is deeply entrenched in the mythology of Paris, and mythology as often as not has little to do with facts or historical truths.

This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience.

The “electrosensitive” are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?

If Howard Goldblatt is doing his job well, no one realizes that he's doing it at all. This is because his job is translation, which, if done correctly, is invisible—with all the characters, plot points, descriptions, and, most challengingly, the jokes reading as seamlessly as though they'd been originally created in English.

Yet readers who pick up an English translation of a book by Mo Yan, Wang Shuo, Su Tong, or any other contemporary Chinese novelist are, more likely than not, reading Goldblatt. "It's all my words," he says. "If they're reading a translated novel, they're reading the translation and hope that the translator got the story, style, and characters right."

I'm told I have no say in the matter. The cover that the publisher designs has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it's usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover. Thankfully, I win this one, agreeing to shoot the cover photo myself, gratis. When my publicist tries to pitch the book to NPR's Terry Gross, a producer tells him that Terry likes the "Shutter" part of the title but not the "babe" part.

Can a novelist retire? Do retired novelists exist, like retired accountants? It does seem unusual, as odd for a writer to be in retirement from words as for a man to be, as William H. Gass once wrote, “in retirement from love.”

Novelists naturally hope that their scenes and phrases will lodge in the memory, but it’s chiefly poets who strategically seek, balancing syllable against syllable, to embed specific cadences, individual verbatim phrases. Most of their work is for naught, of course, and there’s something especially moving about those poets who, in the mind of the individual reader, have effectively created only one poem, or one phrase. Their souls hang so tenuously in our heads!

These visions haunt his sleep and devour his days. They also make him, in order of succession: an object of curiosity and amusement, a wealthy corporate consultant and, finally, a reluctant prophet.

Time is on the block. The New York Times is teetering. It can get an alumnus down, but the last thing the news business needs is a case of nostalgia.

Now come two new books that are part manifestoes, part templates for achieving simplicity in business and government. Both display a lot of common sense, arguing for the elimination of bureaucracy and redundancy and insisting that consumers (of health care, insurance, credit and products large and small) deserve more transparency. But both also sidestep some of the difficulties involved in reducing or containing complexity in today’s lawyered-up and interconnected society.

In a real field camp, whoever had the bright idea to jam his paws into a dinosaur skull and start rooting around would be stopped with a scream of four-letter invective.

Levitt published thirty-four papers on flatus. He identified the three sulfur gases responsible for flatus odor. He showed that it is mainly trapped methane gas, not dietary fiber or fat, that makes the floater float. Most memorably, to this mind anyway, he invented the flatus-trapping Mylar “pantaloon.”

Some say that the “recluse” is an endangered species, but to my knowledge, there’s still one artist who is keeping the idea of the private public figure alive: Bill Watterson, writer and illustrator of the beloved comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”

Roald Dahl’s bookish heroine is still an inspiration to the quiet girls.

Changing key plot points in a well-loved book can be risky. Hell hath no fury like a hardcore fan scorned. Often, the most hardcore fans of all are the authors.

“Gulp” is far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach’s love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. Having graduated from corpses (“Stiff”), the afterlife (“Spook”) and sex (“Bonk,” full of stunts featuring Ms. Roach as guinea pig), she takes on a subject wholly mainstream. She explores it with unalloyed merriment. And she is fearless about the embarrassment that usually accompanies it.

Delivered economically, her judgments are not only clever but perspicacious, humane, and, for the most part, convincing. Her real subject is not the love lives of barely post-adolescent girls, but human nature and society. Austen wrote stories that show us how we think.

Whom or what does the prize serve?

At 21 years old, I had never tried egg foo yung. A first-generation American-born Chinese, I was banned from certain things as a child. Television. Dating. Action movies. Then there was Chinese-American food, of which egg foo yung is an icon.

A long, long, long time ago (like, last year) I wrote an obituary for the word Artisanal. It seemed high time to declare the word dead and get on with our lives. And yet, it has become clear in the months that have followed that even if Artisanal did die, Artisanal has a radioactive half-life so powerful that it could for years sustain full-fledged underground communities of humans making bread from hand-picked cornhusks and locally sifted flour. Artisanal is not dead, it's undead, a whole food zombie running around feasting on artisanal brains. Artisanal, regardless of an organic beefsteak tomato through the heart or a hand-hewn bamboo stick to the brain, is eternal. Eternally damned, maybe, but sticking around and torturing us nonetheless.

Twelve years after the publication of “Fast Food Nation” and nearly as long since Morgan Spurlock almost ate himself to death, our relationship with fast food has changed.

The title of Simon Horobin's book poses what, at first blush, seems a banal question. I imagine most readers would answer "Yes, spelling matters", perhaps adding "though not as much as some believe". Yet if the question of how words should be written is not uppermost in many people's minds, its nagging everyday presence is nonetheless evident in the existence of spell-checkers and school spelling tests, as well as in mnemonics designed to help us with spellings, such as the venerable "i before e except after c".

Generating new knowledge of what factors affect genital morphology in ducks, one of the few vertebrate species other than humans that form pair bonds and exhibit violent sexual coercion, may have significant applied uses in the future, but we must conduct the basic research first.

Six narratives about sex that, due to the writer's verbal deftness, manage to be unflaggingly funny yet never wearisome.

Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk.

The curious phenomenon of word aversion.

“Life After Life” is far more than a game or a stunt; it’s rich in the gravity and texture of reality.