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Yes, I Am Car-Free In Los Angeles

Stevie St. John, LA Weekly

But while I knew I'd be sacrificing convenience, I was excited to leave the freeway behind. I'd had a contentious relationship with L.A.'s roads from the start.

What Is Zero Fahrenheit, Anyway?

Cecil Adams, Washington City Paper

Think what this means: The method supposedly used to determine zero on Fahrenheit’s scale doesn’t always work. Who would be foolish enough to invent a temperature scale that wouldn’t permit thermometers to be reliably calibrated?

Ghosts Of The Tsunami

Richard Lloyd Parry, London Review Of Books

I met a priest in the north of Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until later in the year, but Reverend Kaneda’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on 11 March 2011 was the most violent that he, or anyone he knew, had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough, when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Kaneda’s temple with corpses to bury.

What Makes A Book A Classic

Laura Miller, Salon

Do Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace qualify, and if not, why not?

The Way Back

Dave Wedge and Casey Sherman, Esquire

An extraordinary journey down a river in France, with 114 victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing.

In France, A Battle To Keep Menus Fresh

Liz Alderman, New York Times

Even though France is renowned as a world capital of gastronomy, these days, odds have grown that a savory-looking entree or dessert — especially at establishments near tourist attractions like the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame or Montmartre — may have been at least partly prepared by an industrial food giant, frozen, then reheated in a kitchen. Even the bread, the French bread, may have been made in an industrial bakery.

The solution is just as French: Lawmakers are expected to approve this month a consumer protection law requiring restaurants to designate fresh dishes with a “fait maison,” or “homemade” logo. If a dish is unlabeled, some or all of it is presumed to come from an assembly line.

The Beatles, Bootlegs And Vermeer

Penn Jillette, CNN

"Tim's Vermeer" didn't diminish my love, respect, enjoyment or awe of Vermeer's paintings. I still believe in genius. But, for better or worse, all geniuses have to work their asses off.

Will Technology Make Work Better For Everyone?

Miles brundage, Slate

Technology won't, on its own, create fulfilling jobs for all. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

In The Beginning, There Was A Nipple

Marin Cogan, ESPN

Ten years ago, 90 million people watching Super Bowl XXXVIII saw Janet Jackson's breast for nine-sixteenths of a second. Our culture would never be the same.

William Shakespeare, The 'King Of Infinite Space’

Dan Falk, The Telegraph

The genius from Stratford-upon-Avon has worn many hats over the years, with imaginative scholars casting him as a closet Catholic, a mainstream Protestant, an ardent capitalist, a Marxist, a misogynist, a feminist, a homosexual, a legal clerk and a cannabis dealer – yet the words “Shakespeare” and “science” are rarely uttered in the same breath.

A surprise, perhaps, given that he was producing his greatest work just as new ideas about the human body, the Earth and the universe were transforming Western thought. But a re-evaluation is on the horizon. Scholars are examining Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time – what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work.

The Food May Be Fast, But These Customers Won’t Be Rushed

Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times

With its low coffee prices, plentiful tables and available bathrooms, McDonald’s restaurants all over the country, and even all over the world, have been adopted by a cost-conscious set as a coffeehouse for the people, a sort of everyman’s Starbucks.

The Emerald Light In The Air

Donald Antrim, New Yorker

There’s A Science To Foot Traffic, And It Can Help Us Design Better Cities

Nick Stockton, Wired

Before there was Space Syntax the multinational company, there was space syntax, the science of how cities work. In the late 1970s, British architects Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson hit on the idea that any space within a city – or the entire city itself – could be analyzed in terms of connectivity and movement. They reasoned that a city’s success depended largely on how easy it was for people to move about on foot.

$200 Minus $200

Claire Lundberg, Slate

Having a baby in Paris gave me a crash course in socialized medicine—and a new, very French definition of “costly.”

Looking For Insight Among The World’s Irks And Quirks

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Mr. Novak has an idiosyncratic voice that’s distinctively his own, though “One More Thing” (a title that oddly recalls the line that Columbo, the television police investigator, liked to use to eke out clues from unsuspecting suspects) will also produce lots of comparisons to other writers.

Examining The Square Root Of D’oh!

Amir Alexander, New York Times

As the British author Simon Singh shows in “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets,” math is everywhere in the Simpsons’ world, from references that flash across the screen in an eye blink (such as Springfield’s Googolplex movie theater) to entire segments that explore deep mathematical concepts (like “Homer3” in 1995). Math is built into the show’s DNA.

Everything You’re Thinking About Nintendo Is Totally Wrong

Chris Kohler, Wired

The conventional wisdom is wrong. It is not an inevitability that Nintendo must put its games on rival hardware or die. It may even be a bad move.

How Do You Say Addictive In Spanish?

Seth Stevenson, Slate

The wonderful free language app that makes learning new tongues incredibly fun.

Book Review: "Lives In Writing" By David Lodge

DJ Taylor, The Independent

Art that rises from personal debris.

Reviewing Reviews Of Reviews — Where Will It All End?

Sam Leith, The Spectator

All this is not to say that we shouldn’t reprint book reviews, nor I suppose that reviewing them is a waste of time. But there can be a sense, particularly when reviewing a review of a literary biography, that the original object of study might have made its excuses and quietly slipped out of the room. Nevertheless…

The Day Etta Died

John Burnside, The Guardian

How Long Have I Got Left?

Paul Kalanithi, New York Times

I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

Under The Covers: 'Why I Read,' By Wendy Lesser

William Giraldi, New York Times

The salient word, of course, is “quality” reading. In his indispensable “Lectures on Russian Literature,” Vladimir Nabokov, with typical Nabokovian acuity, chided those pedants “who talk about books instead of talking within books.” That might appear a distinction without much difference, but Wendy Lesser’s lovely “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books” demonstrates the chasm between Nabokov’s two prepositions. An intellectual of unflinching dignity and gravitas, founder of The Threepenny Review and author of nine previous books — including literary memoir, cultural criticism and an incandescent study of Shostakovich — Lesser talks within books as few now are able to do.

Book Review: 'The Curious History Of The Crossword' By Ben Tausig

Michael Sharp, Wall Street Journal

This tension between the puzzle-as-fun and the puzzle-as-politics is captured beautifully in Ben Tausig's "The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles From Then and Now," which commemorates the puzzle's centenary with specimens from throughout the past 100 years and thematic chapters tracing the puzzle's history.

That's What She Said: The Rise And Fall Of The 2000S' Best Bad Joke

Daniel A. Gross, The Atlantic

Groan-worthy innuendos in the style of Michael Scott came and went—that's what she said—but they taught important lessons about puns and parodies along the way.

Belltown Diary

Cienna Madrid, The Stranger

After another pause that really caused me to sweat, he walked out of my tiny yard, which has a fence around it separating it from the rest of the gardens, gently closed my gate, and disappeared. The next day, I received my second housewarming gift: a lock for my front gate. I now keep mace by the front door, too.

Happiness And Its Discontents

Mari Ruti, The Chronicle Of Higher Education

All of this can make us feel so anxious about feeling anxious that when we catch ourselves getting a little stirred up, a little excited, even in a good way, we end up suppressing our feelings because we fear that our ardor might deliver us straight into the lair of ... anxiety. In that sense, we are getting a general education in emotional numbness; essentially, we are taught to fear aliveness in all of its manifestations.

Changing Our Stories

Tim Parks, The New York Review Of Books

Can people change their lives? Can novelists change the kind of stories they write? The two questions are not unrelated.

Almost Everything In “Dr. Strangelove” Was True

Eric Schlosser, New Yorker

Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.

Why Television Needs A New Cosby Show

Willa Paskin, Slate

Twenty-two years after he left television, Bill Cosby remains one of the few people who can get a black family show on a network again.

An Extra 2 Seconds Means The World

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Ms. Joyce builds her novel around two 11-year-old English boys who have heard that the year 1972 will be two seconds longer than other years and wonder about the cosmic consequences this change may have. It should go without saying that Ms. Joyce makes the two seconds matter a great deal.

Old McDonald’s

Stacy Torres, New York Times

Like the teenagers who linger over sticky tabletops at Burger King and McDonald’s, these older people have reached a time when their lives do not revolve around work and family. In the absence of those, these public places can anchor routines and provide a sense of structure and belonging.

Dumpling Party Marks Korean New Year With Hundreds Of Mandu And Dozens Of Eaters

Cathy Barrow, Washington Post

Grace Hong is pretty sure her mother would be appalled. Not at the fact that she and her husband celebrate the new year with traditional lucky mandu, dumplings made the Korean way. But possibly at every other aspect of their celebration. With 600 dumplings, 60 guests and an unmentionable amount of wine and beer, the annual fete they call Dumplingfest violates most, if not all, of her mother’s holiday traditions.

The Cult Of Overwork

James Surowiecki, New Yorker

Thirty years ago, the best-paid workers in the U.S. were much less likely to work long days than low-paid workers were. By 2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend seems to be accelerating. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty-five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.

All I Needed To Know About Life I Learned From “Dungeons & Dragons”

Ethan Gilsdorf, Salon

Yes, it’s a fantasy game, and the whole enterprise is remarkably analog, powered by face-to-face banter, storytelling and copious Twizzlers and Doritos. But like any pursuit taken with seriousness (and the right dose of humor), Dungeons & Dragons is more than a mere game. Lessons can be applied to the human experience. In fact, all I really need to know about life I learned by playing D&D.

New Truths That Only One Can See

George Johnson, New York Times

Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.

How I Stopped Procrastinating

Merrill Markoe, New York Times

I learned something about a year ago that I wish I’d learned much sooner. And it happened only after I woke up one morning and couldn’t walk. An X-ray revealed that my hip cartilage had made a unilateral decision to jump ship. I liked my hip cartilage. I thought we’d be together forever.

No, Jane Austen Was Not A Game Theorist

William Deresiewicz, New Republic

Using science to explain art is a good way to butcher both.

Fan Friction

Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker

“Sherlock” and its audiences.

How Japan Stood Up To Old Age

David Pilling, Financial Times

Twenty-five per cent of Japanese are over 65. But not only do they live longer, they work longer, stay healthier, care for their elderly better – and have found ways to pay for it.

Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All

Mark Oppenheimer, New York Times

In September 2008, two graduate students working for Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers, raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park, the sprawling green space behind the main branch of the New York Public Library. They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers. The charade didn’t last. After an hour, Lauren Sessions Goulet, the more senior of the pair, found herself talking to the park’s private security force, which sent her to see their bosses, the Bryant Park Corporation. She was nervous.

Across the street and up 11 floors, in the corporation’s Fifth Avenue office near the park, Goulet explained what Hampton had sent her there to do. “Look, we were just trying to refilm Whyte,” she said, pleading with them. To her relief, the corporation offered to help.

Does Evolution Evolve Under Pressure?

Emily Singer, Wired

Rather than targeting specific traits, as Lamarck’s theory would have predicted, the mutations struck random genes, with some good outcomes and some bad. However, the process wasn’t completely random. Rosenberg’s findings suggested that bacteria were capable of increasing their mutation rates, which might in turn produce strains capable of surviving new conditions.

The World Is Now An Airport

Medium

Everyone knows not to make bomb jokes at the airport. You just don’t do it. You don’t mention terrorism, or Yemen, or discuss unconventional political points of view. If you’re Muslim, you try to minimize anything about your appearance that might symbolize your faith or get you profiled. The point is to be inconspicuous. The less you say, and the more you look and act like every other business traveler, then the more likely it is that you will pass through security and customs unmolested by any special airport screening or extra questioning.

What if the airport were everywhere?

Andrew's Brain – Review

Jane Smiley, The Guardian

The ending of Ragtime is a sad but just one – when characters die, it is because they are working out their fates. All the characters, even the drunken volunteer fireman who deposits a pile of faeces in the car of a black man audacious enough to drive a new Model T, pay their debt of mortification. Doctorow is not nearly that hopeful any more. In Andrew's Brain, only Andrew is even curious about justice. The others get away with murder.

Austin City Limits: ‘Famous Writers I Have Known,’ By James Magnuson

Adam Langer, New York Times

Then again, what is book criticism but another con game, using literary evidence and textual references to give the reader the illusion of authority?

The Paratext's The Thing

Thomas Doherty, The Chronicle Of Higher Education

For many viewers, critics, and scholars, the second (and third, fourth, and fifth) screen is as good as the first. In some quarters, the decorative wraparound material—the term of art is "paratext"—is outshining the prize in the box. The irritating distractions have morphed into the main attractions.

Walk Like A Man

Jessa Crispin, Spolia

Would you be the same person if you were a different gender?

The iPod Of Prison

Joshua Hunt, New Yorker

The SRF-39FP is the gold standard among prison radios in part because it runs on a single AA battery, and offers forty hours of listening time—longer than an iPod Classic. Digital models can require twice as many batteries, like the Sony SRF-M35FP, which runs on two AAAs. Federal inmates are particularly attuned to battery life because they are allowed to spend just three hundred and twenty dollars each month on commissary goods; more cash spent on batteries means less for snacks, stationery, clothing, and toiletries.

Margaret Drabble: In Defiance Of Time

April Bernard, The New York Review Of Books

It only makes sense that a novelist of such long tenure, one so preoccupied with the slippery nature of time, should actually write a novel on the subject of “prolepsis”—the anticipation of future events. Drabble uses the adjectival form of the word frequently in her new novel, beginning with the first sentence: “What she felt for those children, as she was to realize some years later, was a proleptic tenderness.” When one notices its insistent reuse, by a writer of such verbal precision, consulting the dictionary seems a good idea.

Ending “Gone Girl” Differently: The Dangers Of Alternate Last Acts

Laura Miller, Salon

Maybe Flynn is the exception to this phenomenon, and her ending is one of the 8 million Lego pieces she assembled with such cerebral deliberation. But if there was any organic instinct involved at all, I hate to see that hammer fall. She may never be able to put it all back together again.

What Is It About Middlemarch?

Kathryn Schulz, Vulture

In hindsight, however, perhaps the most interesting thing Eliot does here is trace out, in negative space, the contours of a truly great novel. Such a novel would represent human beings, in their inner and outer worlds, with nuance and fidelity. Its prose would be bespoke and cleansed of cliché. It would approach life’s knotty moral questions with knowledge, intelligence, and experience. It could not be fatuous, frothy, prosy, pious, or pedantic. It would have to be rich and filling when served hot; it would also have to keep. Fifteen years later, Eliot sat down and wrote it.

Diary Of A 24-Hour Dive Bar

Sarah Baird, Punch

It’s 10 a.m., and Spider is sweeping cigarette butts from the floor with all the finesse of a waiter cleaning up crumbs between courses at Le Veau d’Or. A scruffy, waiflike man who bears a startling resemblances to the broom with which he’s sweeping, Spider hollers through the empty bar, spittle flying in the morning light, “They just throw ‘em on the floor—don’t care a thing for ‘ol Spider! No damn respect.”

Kama Sutra For Couples Who Have Been Dating For Over Three Years.

Chelsea Davison, McSweeney's

“Svelvik”

Ask your man to help you build a new bed frame from IKEA and mention that there’s a special treat in it for him when it’s done. Wink. Order pizza as the two of you enter your third hour of bed building. Pull up a video tutorial on YouTube and immediately close it when he gets defensive. Lock the cat in the bathroom after she steals a wooden peg that was apparently important. Go to sleep on an air mattress.

A Toast Story

John Gravois, Pacific Standard

How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? Ask a trivial question, get a profound, heartbreaking answer.

The One Theology Book All Atheists Really Should Read

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

What if most modern arguments against religious belief have been attacking the wrong God all along?

Is The Universe Made Of Math?

Max Tegmark, Scientific American

What's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? In Douglas Adams' science-fiction spoof “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. I find it very appropriate that Douglas Adams joked about 42, because mathematics has played a striking role in our growing understanding of our Universe.

We Need Critique In Tech

Ashe Dryden, Model View Culture

Many see the critiques of tech culture and get defensive, not realizing this is a compassionate act.

Why You Can't Travel At The Speed Of Light

Alok Jha, The Guardian

A short history of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report

Kyle Vanhemert, Wired

When AI is cheap, what does all the other technology look like?

You're Only Human. That's The Problem

Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek

Morton is the head of the English department at Rice University and a leader in the field of object-oriented ontology, affectionately known as OOO, a relatively recent philosophical movement that declares the human being just one thing among many things. Human consciousness, for OOO true believers, isn't all that special, even if we are a thing that can write epic poems, perform Bach concertos, and run a mean pick-and-roll.

A Mistake

Akhil Sharma, New Yorker

“The Accidental Universe”: Physics Overthrows Itself

Laura Miller, Salon

Lightman explores the way recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries and theories in physics and cosmology affect the sort of questions human beings ask in fiction: questions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the importance of love. These are obviously puzzles that concern many physicists as well as novelists. But even those scientists who excel at penning lucid popular explications of their work are rarely as gifted at articulating the “messy” bits, such as the contradictory human desires for order and transgression, or our delusory longing for permanence.

"Cock" Means "Vagina." Let Us Explain

Ben Westhoff, LA Weekly

There were surely many casualties in an era when hip-hop's sudden popularity forced this odd bit of slang into a head-on collision with the broader culture: For one group of people, "cock" referred to the male genitalia. For another, it referenced the female.

Mr. Tuck

Koye Oyedeji, Washington City Paper

The Murderer And The Manuscript

Sarah Weinman, New York Times

Before this phone call, it had never occurred to Kirkpatrick that her contest winner might have spent the past 25 years in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence for murder.

Finding Flight In 'The Invention Of Wings'

Bobbi Dumas, NPR

The novel is a textured masterpiece, quietly yet powerfully poking our consciences and our consciousness. What does it mean to be a sister, a friend, a woman, an outcast, a slave? How do we use our talents to better ourselves and our world? How do we give voice to our power, or learn to empower our voice?

Writing To Win

Tim Parks, The New York Review Of Books

Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple fact of publication suddenly make a person, hitherto almost derided, now a proper object of our admiration, a repository of special and important knowledge about the human condition? And more interestingly, what effect does this shift from derision to reverence have on the author and his work, and on literary fiction in general?

When A Food Writer Can’t Taste

Marlena Spieler, New York Times

To not smell the world around me, to not discern tastes, was horrifying. So, in the two years since the accident, I created a taste rehabilitation plan that gradually began to revive my senses of smell and taste.

For World Literature

Caroline Levine, Public Books

In this story of an ever-broadening canon, the study of world literature makes perfect sense. It is simply the latest chapter in the larger story of the widening horizons of literary study. Yet world literature has prompted an awful lot of hand-wringing. Isn’t it absurd to try to study the literature of the entire world?

Mystical Pizza: ‘A Highly Unlikely Scenario,’ By Rachel Cantor

Lydia Netzer, New York Times

In a not-too-distant future, in a world much like our own, a young man sits in a white room, answering a white phone, listening. In his world, fast-food chains and political philosophies are one. Jack-o-Bites chefs and Whiggery Piggery employees brawl with kebab sticks in the public square, and neo-Baconians keep safe houses to protect themselves from the Cathars at the Strawberry Parfait. At the center of it all, Leonard, a customer-service rep for a Pythagorean pizza company, must save the world by time traveling and speaking to historical figures through the Neetsa Pizza support line.

The Saturday Poem: 53° 09'33.17" N, 0° 25'33.18" W

Rory Waterman, The Guardian

On Loins

Ben Blatt, Slate

The incredibly popular, highly contentious Wikipedia pages for penis and vagina. Plus: Meet a guy who uploaded one of the penis photos.

Last Words

Linda Vaccariello, Cincinnati Magazine

Baker had few artifacts from the last months of her son’s life, when schizophrenia had rendered his world chaotic. But she did have the waterlogged message that police found in Brian’s pocket when his body was recovered from the Texas lake where he died. It began painfully: “Maybe my dying is for the best,” he wrote. It then devolved into the confused rambling characteristic of his illness before concluding with two clear and desperate questions: “Where does it end? How does it end?” He answered by drowning himself.

Pestian’s project was so compelling to Baker that, she says, “I tracked him down.” Now her son’s last words are part of an extraordinary collection of data: the language of approximately 1,400 people who have ended their own lives.

Structure

John McPhee, New Yorker

Beyond the picnic-table crisis.

This Spacesuit For Exploring Mars Is A Form-Fitting Math Problem

Joseph Flaherty, Wired

In science fiction, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ender’s Game, astronauts zip around zero-g environments clad in stylish, skin-tight spacesuits. In reality, outfits designed for outer space are bulky, hard to maneuver, and have all the charm of adult diapers. Even their name, Extravehicular Mobility Units, or EMUs, is clumsy.

Enter Dava Newman, fashion designer to the stars.

Once Upon A Time In The West

Ben Tarnoff, Lapham's Quarterly

Mark Twain loved frontier humor, the impish wit and yeasty vernacular, its fondness for the gargantuan and the grotesque. He also understood its deeper value: not merely as entertainment but as a survival tactic.

Today, I Live In The Book

Glenn Fleishman, Medium

The notion that ebooks are the sole path forward into the future, and that printed books are dead ignores nearly all the evidence against it, searching for a narrative that isn’t there.

Period Piece

Brian P. Kelly, The Weekly Standard

If, as Kurt Vonnegut believed, the only reason to use a semicolon is to show that you’ve been to college, what does it say when someone uses a pilcrow? Or, for that matter, an interrobang, a manicule, or an octothorpe? While this book doesn’t make any judgments about the punctuation one chooses to use or avoid, Shady Characters takes an entertaining look at the evolution of both common and lesser-known characters.

Making The Restaurant Part Of The Family

Susan Herrmann Loomis, New York Times

In France, as in many countries, a new generation has tried to loosen the demands of work to make more time for family. But in few professions is the shift more surprising than among elite French chefs.

How The NSA Almost Killed The Internet

Steven Levy, Wired

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.

Fat

Marie Potoczny, Ploughshares

The Graying Of 'The New York Review Of Books'

Russell Jacoby, The Chronicle Of Higher Education

Who criticizes the professional journals or the general book reviews? Few or no one. The reason is obvious. We all hope to be reviewed or noticed.

A Missing Genetic Link In Human Evolution

Emily Singer, Quanta Magazine

About 8 million to 12 million years ago, the ancestor of great apes, including humans, underwent a dramatic genetic change. Small pieces of DNA replicated and spread across their resident chromosomes like dandelions across a lawn. But as these “dandelion seeds” dispersed, they carried some grass and daisy seeds — additional segments of DNA — along for the ride. This unusual pattern, repeated in different parts of the genome, is found only in great apes — bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and humans.

“I think it’s a missing piece of human evolution,” said Evan Eichler, a geneticist at the University of Washington, in Seattle. “My feeling is that these duplication blocks have been the substrate for the birth of new genes."

Written Off

Rebecca Mead, New Yorker

Jennifer Weiner’s quest for literary respect.

The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Reader

Colin Robinson, New York Times

It’s not just more difficult to find the time and focus that a book demands. Longstanding allies of the reader, professionals who have traditionally provided guidance for those picking up a book, are disappearing fast. The broad, inclusive conversation around interesting titles that such experts helped facilitate is likewise dissipating. Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one.

Book Review: 'Glorious Misadventures,' By Owen Matthews

Gerard Helferich, Wall Street Journal

Travelers making the vertiginous, 90-mile drive up Highway 1 from San Francisco to Fort Ross, Calif., may be surprised to come upon a weather-beaten chapel whose severe roofline and mismatched cupolas seem better suited to the Siberian tundra than to the Gold Coast. The church and its companion structures mark the southernmost garrison of Russia's American empire, whose rise and demise are recounted in Owen Matthews's intriguing "Glorious Misadventures."

Where Will We Live?

James Meek, London Review Of Books

A housing shortage that has been building up for the past thirty years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a let-the-poor-be-poor crusade, a Campaign for Real Poverty. The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor. But how different would the situation be if it had?

The Daggers Of Jorge Luis Borges

Michael Greenberg, The New York Review Of Books

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with violence. Speaking to an interviewer about his childhood in what was then the outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, he said, “To call a man, or to think of him, as a coward—that was the last thing…the kind of thing he couldn’t stand.” According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson,1 Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated” demeanor and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man.

Technology, Economy Reshape Dental, Medical, Legal Offices

Beth Herman, Washington Post

Though the term “underwater” may have a negative connotation in today’s economy, there’s no place Ashburn-based dentist Haress Rahim would rather be.

How Can We Make Sense Of The World Without Reading Stories?

Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

How are we to make sense of ourselves and the world that holds us if not by reading stories? For isn't this how we've talked to ourselves – soothed, stimulated and improved ourselves – for thousands of years? I know I sound like a tragic old Leavisite when I say that fiction and ethics are intimately bound, but I feel this to be true. Novel reading boosts empathy or, at any rate reminds us that things are complicated; fiction unpicks knots.

Book Review: 'Empire Of Secrets'

Daniel Johnson, Wall Street Journal

At the heart of Calder Walton's "Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire," an important and highly original account of postwar British intelligence, is a history of the Anglo-American "special relationship."

On Such A Full Sea, By Chang-Rae Lee: Book Review - Looking In From The Peripheries Of A Dangerous Dystopia

Max Liu, The Independent

On Such a Full Sea is a strange, skilful performance by a novelist who is brave enough to consistently subvert our expectations of narrative continuity.

Barracuda By Christos Tsiolkas – Review

Mark Lawson, The Guardian

In his first novel since The Slap – which became an international bestseller, igniting debate over its depiction of the sexual and racial politics of Australia – Christos Tsiolkas chooses a telling phrase to describe a change of season. "Spring," we are told, "had yet to beat back winter."

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of "personalized genres" need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

Locked In Rooms Of Their Own

Paul Constant, The Stranger

The real answer to all my hand-wringing is that I should just work harder to make sure that everyone is included. I regret not doing better.

Book Review: ‘Little Failure: A Memoir’ By Gary Shteyngart

Lisa Zeidner, Washington Post

“We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat,” Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said about the roots of Russian literature. Wildly surreal and replete with snarky social commentary, Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” features a poor nebbish who is easy to mock — yet still lovable. Like Gogol, the best-selling Russian-born American novelist Gary Shteyngart delights in raining misfortune on his antiheroes’ heads as they navigate the farcical obstacle courses of their lives. In his memoir “Little Failure,” the pathetic dweeb is Shteyngart himself. Real name Igor, a.k.a. “Little Failure,” “Weakling,” “Jew-nose” or — due to his bad asthma — “Snotty.”

The Man At The River

Dave Eggers, Granta

‘Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art Of Dying,’ By D.T. Siebert

Michael Dirda, Washington Post

One can read “Mortality’s Muse” for pleasure, even though it addresses that most painful aspect of human existence: our dreadful knowledge that each of us must die.

Restaurant Portions Destroy Your Diet: Eating Out Is Killing Us!

Deborah A. Choen, Salon

Every restaurant serves different portion sizes: some are large, some giant, and others gargantuan. This leaves many of us confused and prone to eating far too much. How much easier would it be to control our intake if we knew that a cheeseburger had 400 calories whether we purchased it at McDonald’s, Burger King, or Denny’s? Or that lunch was going to contain just 640 calories, regardless of what we ordered?

Sweet! Pastry Chefs Are Making A Comeback

Betty Hallock, Los Angeles Times

After some rough years, conditions are just right for the return of those responsible for diners’ sugargasms. The proof is in, so to speak, the pudding.

When The Yellow Press Got Color

J. Hoberman, The New York Review Of Books

The sudden explosion of color comics had been facilitated by new high-speed four-color printing presses, but “lead pipe” may have been the operative term in Hearst’s boast. The original comics were designed to stun—both their startling graphics and their rambunctious antics.