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Do Returns Diminish On Rereading And Re-rereading?

Stuart Kelly, The Guardian

The Man Booker judges are always in a strange situation, provided they do the work as assigned. We will have read the winner more frequently and more stringently than the so-called average reader. I should, for the record, say that no reader is average. Each has a unique engagement with a text, and every one of those responses is valid, if not right. But let's face it, not many of the slightly fictitious reading public are going to read any Man Booker winner three times.

As I Lay Lying

Ben Crair, New Republic

Standing desks are taking over, so I worked from bed to protest.

Why Apple Wants To Bust Your iPhone

Catherine Rampell, New York Times

When major innovations remain out of reach, and degrading durability threatens to tick off loyal customers, companies like Apple can still take a cue from the fashion industry. If you can brainwash consumers into developing new tastes that make the old stuff look uncool for aesthetic rather than functional reasons, you still have a shot at harvesting more sales from your existing customer base. But it seems Apple may have already figured this out too. Just check out the wait times for the iPhone 5S in that shiny new gold color.

Radios Going Bump In The Night

Colin Fleming, The Smart Set

By the 1960’s listening to stories on the radio might have seemed square, but not if it was the wonderful and weird terrors of the work of Erik Bauersfeld.

The Reef: A Passionate History, By Iain McCalman – Book Review

Miriam Cosic, The Guardian

McCalman's tone shifts from the boy's own adventure, scientific excitement and scamming of early encounters, to dizzying disaster-epic suspense. But never for a moment does his literary skill falter. His detailed explanation of marine science is a model of translation for the layman.

Forging An Art Market In China

David Barboza, Graham Bowley And Amanda Cox, New York Times

When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.

But two years after the auction, Qi Baishi’s masterpiece is still languishing in a warehouse in Beijing. The winning bidder has refused to pay for the piece since doubts were raised about its authenticity.

Lou Reed: The Rolling Stone Interview (May 4, 1989)

David Fricke, Rolling Stone

Reed talks about the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and his new album, the scathingly brilliant "New York".

The Value Of Reading Novels

Shmuly Yanklowitz, The Huffington Post

Powerful novels demand that we slow down and process how we are creating and destroying in our lives. The rabbis taught that amidst so much destructive behavior we must stop and reflect upon the world we exist in.

Weight Watchers

Thomas McGuane, New Yorker

“The Luminaries”: A Gothic Cathedral Of Plot

Laura Miller, Salon

From the first five pages of “The Luminaries,” it’s evident that Catton’s model is the Victorian “sensation novel,” in which middle-class characters were suddenly confronted with alarming, inexplicable and uncanny events whose true causes and (usually scandalous) nature are gradually revealed in the course of the story.

Why Readers Love Big Biographies

Scott Porch, Salon

It's aspirational. Says one publisher, we hope "there’s something about genius [...] that can rub off."

The Man Who Would Teach Machines To Think

James Somers, The Atlantic

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

Clock Change Challenge

Rebekah Higgitt, The Guardian

It's annoying, to be sure, to have to remember twice a year when and which way the clock changes. But be comforted by this: it could have been much worse.

Her Dynasty

Orville Schell, New York Times

While Chang’s admiration can approach hagiography, her extensive use of new Chinese sources makes a strong case for a reappraisal.

A Poet With Words Trapped Inside

John Leland, New York Times

“I can’t count the times I viscerally wanted to attack, deform and maim the language I was taught to hate myself in,” one of the characters said. “The language that perpetuates the notion that causes pain to every black child.” No one else writes like that.

But for Ntozake Shange (pronounced en-toh-ZAH-kee SHAHN-gay), who once made a point of writing a poem every day so she would have fresh material to present at readings, the new lines came laden with an unfamiliar struggle.

Six Bad Poets By Christopher Reid – Review

Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

Six Bad Poets is written by one good poet. It is a satirical narrative poem that travels light.

Momma Mia!

Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair

Grounded in her human-rights work, Mia Farrow can look back at another triumph—the loving home she created for 14 adopted and biological children. But she must also continue to deal with the wreckage from the sensational scandal that almost rent it apart 20 years ago.

Our Man At The Oxford English Dictionary Enjoys The Last Word

Elizabeth Grice, The Telegraph

Today, the OED is not just a hefty collection of reference books but a dynamic online resource that tells the story of human history through the words we use. Simpson has masterminded that revolution. “Maybe it’s time to see what happens outside the windows,” he muses of his impending retirement.

Me, Myself And I: Why Autobiography Is Cursed By An Unreliable Narrator

Robert McCrum, The Guardian

Paradoxically, the most reliable autobiography might be the work of a third party, a ghost.

Slaves Of The Internet, Unite!

Tim Kreider, New York Times

“Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors...” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment.

Stephen Leacock’s Canada Is Nearly Gone, But This Lovingly Illustrated New Edition Lets Us Look Back

Nick Mount, The Globe And Mail

I know it feels good to see something of yourself in the books you read, the way Seth and I can in Sunshine Sketches. I know it would be a mistake and a sadness if we only looked to books for people just like us. And I know I hope you think there’s room in our literatures and our classrooms for both.

The Secret Life Of A Manhattan Doorman

Garrett McGrath, Narratively

A college student is stoked to land a summer gig as a union-wage doorman—until he learns the job description includes everything from hauling out hoarders to discovering dead bodies.

Book Review: ‘A Cruel And Shocking Act’ By Philip Shenon

Beverly Gage, Washington Post

Rather than attempting to offer the Ultimate Truth of the Kennedy Assassination, Shenon presents a persuasive, deeply researched account of why, 50 years out, that truth still seems so hard to find.

Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?

Darrin M. McMahon, The Chronicle Of Higher Education

The democratization of genius represents a victory for human equality. But if everyone can be a genius, then what does it mean?

Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Uncertain Biological Basis Of Morality

Robert Wright, The Atlantic

Squaring recent research suggesting we're "naturally moral" with all the strife in the world.

The Inside Story Of The Muppets

Kyle Minor, Salon

"Jim Henson: A Biography" wonderfully tells the story of the man, his creations, and his care for others.

The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets By Simon Singh – Review

Thomas Jones, The Guardian

Mmm … pi: the cult TV series is deeply in love with numbers.

Palaeontology: The Truth About T. Rex

Brian Switek, Nature

Even one of the best known dinosaurs has kept some secrets. Here is what palaeontologists most want to know about the famous tyrant.

How Science Nailed The Age Of The Earth

Paul S. Braterman, Salon

A new understanding of radioactive decay has answered a question that's puzzled scholars for centuries.

Now We Are Five

David Sedaris, New Yorker

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn’t sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.

Can A $400 Blender Change Your Life?

Catherine Price, Slate

Yes.

Why Have Young People In Japan Stopped Having Sex?

Abigail Haworth, The Guardian

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.

Book Review: The Curve, By Nicholas Lovell

Emma Jacobs, Financial Times

Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails, the industrial rock band, gets it. Björk, the creative Icelandic singer-songwriter, known for her outlandish outfits and innovative music, does not.

I’m The Accidental Owner Of A Banksy

Cara Tabachnick, New York Magazine

“Are you going to be rich?” That is the first question people ask me upon finding out that in the wee morning hours of October 17, the famed street artist Banksy painted a mural on the side of a building my family owns in East Williamsburg.

Love In The Gardens

Zadie Smith, The New York Review Of Books

When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money “earned” for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery. We looked at the contract more than once, checking and rechecking it, just like a lottery ticket, to ensure no mistake had been made. No mistake had been made. I was to be paid for writing a book. For a long time, neither of us could work out what to do about this new reality. My father kept on with his habit of tucking a ten- or twenty-pound note inside his letters to me. I took the rest of my family (my parents having separated long before) to a “resort” back in the “old country” (the Caribbean) where we rode around bored in golf carts, argued violently, and lined up in grim silence to receive a preposterous amount of glistening fruit, the only black folk in line for the buffet.

Authors Accept Censors’ Rules To Sell In China

Andrew Jacobs, New York Times

Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition.

The Bone Dragon By Alexia Casale – Review

Linda Buckley-Archer, The Guardian

Dark, with unexpected twists and a strong – if disturbing – ending, the narrative has a relentless emotional charge.

The Rise Of The Coffee Machines

Will Oremus, Slate

Should Starbucks replace its baristas with robots?

Musts, Maybes, And Nevers: Book Review

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter

What most distinguishes Picker's book from innumerable other insiders' accounts of Hollywood doings is its first-hand look at the moment of inception of so many famous films.

The Saturday Poem: Exit Interview

Blake Morrison, The Guardian

22 Hours In Balthazar

Willy Staley, New York Times

Balthazar may look like a rustic bistro, but behind the scenes, it’s a highly efficient, well-oiled potato-chipping machine.

Trouble At The Lab

The Economist

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.

The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

Marnie Hanel, New York Times

Under the dark water, the teenagers looked around with the help of a diving light. At 45 feet, they passed a sunken ship, the Honey Bear, and at 85 feet, beneath the buoy line, they saw further evidence of the former marina — steel beams, pilings and sunken watercrafts. Marine life thrived in this haven of junk, and for this reason, Cove 2 was a popular dive site. According to the permit he had just purchased at Walmart, Mayer was allowed to catch this sea life and cook it, which is exactly what he set out to do. He wasn’t much of a chef, but he had experience foraging for his dinner. Mayer had attended a high school known for its Future Farmers of America program; he also knew how to slaughter cows and castrate bulls. Now he was going to community college, where he was asked to draw something from nature. He figured that he might as well eat it too. And as he scanned the bay, he could already imagine searing the marine morsels on high heat and popping them, rare and unctuous, into his mouth. He soon spotted his prey. “That’s a big [expletive] octopus,” he scribbled on his underwater slate.

Life On Ships That Make World Go Round

Dwight Garner, New York Times

In part, “Ninety Percent of Everything” is an adventure story. Ms. George — she is a vegetarian teetotaler with little experience of the sea — is permitted to catch a ride on a giant container ship, the Maersk Kendal. She resembles a cat that has sneaked aboard the Starship Enterprise. The ship carries her from the “southern English port of Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the pillars of Hercules, pirate waters, and weather.”

Why Our Future Depends On Libraries, Reading And Daydreaming

Neil Gaiman, The Guardian

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

Book Review: ‘The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age Of Amazon,’ By Brad Stone

Bethany McLean, Washington Post

“Explosive.” That’s how the cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek bills “The Everything Store” by journalist Brad Stone. That’s an overstatement — but the meticulously reported book has plenty of gems for anyone who cares about Amazon, Jeff Bezos, entrepreneurship, leadership or just the lunacy it took to build a company in less than two decades that now employs almost 90,000 people and sold $61 billion worth of, well, almost everything last year.

Maths Is Fun (Sometimes)

Dean Burnett, The Guardian

Think about that for a second. The most popular TV show in history, an animated comedy, had a writing staff packed with maths experts. If you can work out the odds of that happening by chance, they'd probably give you a job. But whatever you make of this, the fact that mathematicians are behind the most successful comedy in history does somewhat annihilate the stereotypical view that maths, and by extension mathematicians, are no fun, or "humourless".

Review: Book On Amazon Looks At How Jeff Bezos Got Everything

Jay Greene, The Seattle Times

It is the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life.

A New Challenge To Books – Stories That Follow You Into The Real World

Jennifer Rankin, The Guardian

New technology makes simple ebooks look flat, but will new, immersive stories find favour with readers?

Unusable Words

Brad Leithauser, New Yorker

I was seeking a replacement for “unfathomable.” I thought of “depthless,” but, feeling a bit iffy about it, I consulted my old Webster’s Second. Yes, it was a synonym for “unfathomable” (“Of measureless depth … unsoundable”) but also for “fathomable” (“Having no depth; shallow”). The word was what I think of as an auto-antonym (a term that doesn’t appear in Webster’s Second): it’s its own opposite. Which is to say, it’s a mostly unusable word.

The Medieval Battle That Launched Modern English

Annelisa Stephan, The Getty Iris

William’s capture of the English crown from Harold II was a turning point for history, politics, literature, and art—but also for language. It began the transformation of English from an orderly Germanic tongue into the sprawling, messy hybrid we speak today. In short, the Battle of Hastings is the reason we talk funny.

Scott Adams' Secret Of Success: Failure

Scott Adams, Wall Street Journal

So forget about passion. And while you're at it, forget about goals, too.

Newton's Universal Law Of Gravitation

Alok Jha, The Guardian

How Isaac Newton's encounter with that apple ended up helping send rockets into space.

Poem Of The Week: Conjuration By Pauline Stainer

Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Compressing the great myths of resurrection into vignettes, questions of life and death are here reanimated in tangible form.

“The Goldfinch”: Donna Tartt’s 21St-century Dickens

Laura Miller, Salon

Donna Tartt's masterful, enveloping feat of storytelling about an orphan who steals a celebrated artwork.

TED Talks Are Lying To You

Thomas Frank, Salon

The creative class has never been more screwed. Books about creativity have never been more popular. What gives?

The Marathon Of Their Lives

David Fleming, ESPN

Runner No. 3694 in the Chicago Marathon was known as Superman. Runner No. 21385 was nine months' pregnant. At Mile 26, their paths diverged. And there's no explaining why only one crossed the finish line.

What Stephen King Isn’t

Joshua Rothman, New Yorker

“Doctor Sleep” underscores an interesting fact about King: he’s not really, or not exclusively, a horror writer.

I Got Hired At A Bangladesh Sweatshop. Meet My 9-Year-old Boss

Raveena Aulakh, Toronto Star

Meem is 9 years old and works as a sewing helper in a garment factory. For a few days this summer, she was also my boss.

She taught me the tricks of trimming. She taught me to smile when my back ached. She taught me some Bengali words.

Sab bhalo. It is all okay.

Empress Dowager Cixi By Jung Chang, Review

James Owen, The Telegraph

The fatal charm of China’s unsung empress has beguiled even her biographer.

Book Review: ‘I Am Malala’ By Malala Yousafzai

Marie Arana, Washington Post

Whether an emerging nation likes it or not, its girls are its greatest resource. Educating them, as economist Lawrence Summers once said, “may be the single highest-return investment available in the developing world.”

Nowhere is that lesson more evident than in the story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pashtun girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley who was born of an illiterate mother, grew up in her father’s school, read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” by age 11 and has a gift for stirring oratory.

Book Review: 'Jim Henson' By Brian Jay Jones

Will Friedwald, Wall Street Journal

Highly readable and never long-winded (even at nearly 600 pages), "Jim Henson" joyously documents its subject's knack for combining old-fashioned puppetry with the world's newest entertainment medium to forge a kind of furry, felt-covered vaudeville.

The Circle By Dave Eggers – Review

Edward Docx, The Guardian

Although Eggers is saying all the same things as Franzen (and so much more), he makes his case not through the often tetchy medium of the essay, but in the glorious, ever resilient and ever engaging form of the novel.

Why Unsuccessful Writers Give The Best Advice

Noah Berlatsky, Salon

Most people wouldn’t necessarily look at my amalgamation of cobbled together gigs and say, “That’s the writing career I want.” It’s natural that you’d turn to more successful writers, and just as natural that those folks tend to talk about writing as a craft and a calling. But I think it’s valuable, too, to know that writing, for most people, most of the time, is less like an art and a craft and a calling than it is like a job.

Why Are Hundreds Of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?

Christine Gross-Loh, The Atlantic

The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life."

The Rise Of The Reader: Journalism In The Age Of The Open Web

Katharine Viner, The Guardian

A newspaper is complete. It is finished, sure of itself, certain. By contrast, digital news is constantly updated, improved upon, changed, moved, developed, an ongoing conversation and collaboration. It is living, evolving, limitless, relentless.

This Book Will Stop You Watching Football

Kevin Fixler, The Daily Beast

Are you a football fan? This one book will change the way you view the NFL and the price players pay for your enjoyment and dollars.

A Quantum Leap

Lawrence Krauss, Slate

The discovery of the Higgs boson particle puts our understanding of nature on a new firm footing.

Book Review: For Food Network Addicts, New Book Hits The Spot

Jessica Gresko, Associated Press

In "From Scratch: Inside the Food Network," Allen Salkin guides readers through the history of the network, from its start in the 1990s to today. Along the way, Salkin serves up plenty of stories that will surprise and entertain.

Gladwell Is Goliath

Daniel Engber, Slate

Do puny readers stand a chance against his latest book?

The Signature Of All Things By Elizabeth Gilbert – Review

Elizabeth Day, The Guardian

The Signature of All Things, Gilbert's sixth book and her second work of full-length fiction, is quite simply one of the best novels I have read in years.

Palimpsest By Kristina Marie Darling

Anne Champion, The Rumpus.net

No matter how inspired Darling may be, her work never serves as a copy: Darling delights in the formal experimentation within her work.

To Perfect And Serve: For Some New Restaurants, It’s Never Too Early To Shut Down And Start Over

Jessica Sidman, Washington City Paper

It’s still rare for such young restaurants to close after only a few weeks or months in order to make things right. Sure, it’s not uncommon to shut down for renovations and reopen with a new look, new menu, or even a new concept. But typically, that happens after the place has been around at least a few years, and the carpet has grown dingy and the menu outdated.

Book Review: 'Becoming A Londoner' By David Plante

D.J. Taylor, Wall Street Journal

Sir John Betjeman once wrote a poem called "How to Get On in Society" ("Phone for the fish-knives, Norman, as Cook is a little unnerved. . . .") The advice it tenders is, of course, ironic. An upper-class Englishman of the time would have "telephoned" rather than "phoned," and fish-knives were for parvenus. To David Plante, a young American arriving in the London of the mid-1960s with that age-old ambition of being a writer and meeting interesting people, the challenge was not so much to crack a linguistic code (although the "lunch" versus "luncheon" debate needs careful handling) as to find a reliable sponsor. Guide books are clearly important, but how much more satisfactory to meet the man who wrote them.

Let’s Do It

John Williams, New York Times

As Deborah Eisenberg once put it, “The anatomical possibilities are limited, so a poorly written sex scene can be a little like hearing an 8-year-old describe the plot of his favorite movie.” Even John Updike won a lifetime achievement award for bad sex writing. Yet, as Sam Lipsyte wrote in The New Republic earlier this year, “We delight in the comedy of bad sex writing, probably because it corresponds to the comedy of our bodies, which are, minus the most gorgeous 1 percent, not nearly as delectable and confident as we might fantasize.”

Why Do We Eat Popcorn At The Movies?

Natasha Geiling, Smithsonia.com

The history of popcorn is vast, and it intersects with movies in the relatively recent past–a symbiosis of taste and place created to save the fledgling movie theater industry from near collapse during the Great Depression.

Becoming A Londoner: A Diary By David Plante – Review

Lara Feigel, The Guardian

Plante has come to Europe seeking promiscuity; instead, he is surprised into monogamous happiness. "Is this love?" he asks. "Is it love to want to be with him when he dies, and close his eyes?"

The Age Of Amazon Still Needs Editors Like Max Perkins

Gavin James Bower, The Guardian

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius is reissued this month, 35 years after it was first published – but what can the man who told Ernest Hemingway to "tone it down" and lived to tell the tale teach us about publishing today?

‘Radio Free Boston’ By Carter Alan

Sarah Rodman, The Boston Globe

The fairy tale of WBCN may not have had a happy ending, but Alan tells it with the kind of flair that does its original free-form spirit proud.

What Stanley Kubrick Got Wrong About “The Shining”

Laura Miller, Salon

Stephen King has always disliked Stanley Kubrick's film of "The Shining," and he has a point.

Solo By William Boyd – Review

Richard Williams, The Guardian

A Bond book is a tough gig, but Boyd's authentically written attempt entertains more than it exasperates.

Astronaut And A Writer At The Movies

Dennis Overbye, New York Times

“Gravity” opens this week, but it has already won rapturous reviews at film festivals in Venice and Toronto. So when the distributor, Warner Brothers, offered me a chance to watch the movie with an actual astronaut, I happily tagged along.

Jim Henson: The Biography

Brian Jay Jones, The A.V. Club

The creative force behind The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth did a tremendous amount of living for someone who died in his mid-50s. On that count alone Brian Jay Jones’ book earns its 600-page heft—as portrayed in the words of Jones and his sources, Henson’s perpetual sense of momentum could’ve generated enough anecdotes to fill a volume three times that length. But the book’s comprehensiveness is also a function of Jones’ onus as biographer: For a pop-culture figure who had as tremendous an impact as Henson did, such a penetrating look at his life is long overdue. Much has been written about Henson—during his life and after—but nothing with the same sense of authority and access as Jim Henson: The Biography. Clearly, Jones didn’t want to leave anything out.

Friends Without Benefits

Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair

“Social media is destroying our lives,” a 16-year-old girl from L.A. tells contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales. But without it, she says, she “would have no life.”