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Home Fires

George Packer, New Yorker

How soldiers write their wars.

Destination Unknown

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

For Ms. Marciano’s characters, travel — or moving to another town or country, another culture — is a way of reinventing themselves, of shrugging off an identity and trying on something enchantingly exotic or just faintly new. It’s a way to close out one chapter of their lives, be it a marriage, a relationship, a career, and start over again, if not with a blank slate, then at least with less baggage than before.

The Radical Readers Of San Francisco

Andrew Whitehead, BBC

The city of San Francisco is home to some of the world's best bookshops, including one which specialises in obscure political tracts and another which has become synonymous with the Beat literary movement.

Four Critics, One Restaurant’s Food, Sound, Design, Fashion

Tom Sietsema, Chris Richards, Philip Kennicott, Robin Givhan, Washington Post

Even hired mouths will tell you that restaurants are about more than what you get on the plate. Food is important, yes, but people leave home to break bread for plenty of other reasons: companionship, comfort, ambiance.

It would make sense, then, to engage more than just a culinarian to examine a restaurant. We sent experts in food, design, fashion and music to train their eyes, ears and pens on a popular Washington eatery.

The subject: the Japanese-inspired Daikaya across from Verizon Center.

The aim: four ways of looking at a dining experience.

Wonder Woman: Greatest Super-heroine Ever?

Noah Berlatsky, Salon

A feminist, a sex symbol, a superhero and an icon. A new book makes the case for Wonder Woman's awesomeness.

The Business Of Building Roller Coasters

Zachary Crockett, Priceonomics

Perhaps no other creation in history has navigated the divide between terror and unadulterated joy as skillfully as the roller coaster.

Bernard And Cerinthe

Linda France, The Guardian

Everybody Loathes Raymond

B. J. Novak, New York Times

Is Gunt meant to be a reasonable straight man of sorts, in the midst of an entire world gone bad — as he repeatedly claims in direct entreaties to the reader? Or is the world itself the straight man, allowing us to appreciate the antics of a uniquely loathsome human being?

Downtown Food Goes North

Glenn Collins, New York Times

Upper Manhattan as a whole was never exactly the land that food forgot, but now this sprawling, hilly fastness — where not too long ago “people never ate out because they had to be home at 7 to watch ‘Jeopardy,’ ” as James Moran Jr., who was born in the neighborhood and now runs a restaurant there, put it — has been showing the unmistakable signs of menu relevance.

My 11:35 PM TV Comedy Provider

Andy Ihnatko

But it’s all about the person behind the desk. He doesn’t need a crutch, he doesn’t need a rescue, he doesn’t need a gimmick, and he doesn’t need to beg to be liked. He has that weird ability to have an actual conversation with someone and find the funny. He also has that beguiling ability to spot a road into a serious issue, and pull the wagons off of the Funny Trail.

Dave is, beyond a doubt, the last of his kind. The long shadow of Johnny Carson is the only thing that keeps me from adding “…and the finest there ever was.”

What’s The Best Way To Execute Someone?

Matt McCarthy, Slate

Because of the breathtaking incompetence of state governments and prison systems, we can no longer rely on lethal injection as a means of execution. Until the American Board of Anesthesiology and the American Medical Association collectively reverse their position banning physician involvement—and there’s no indication they will (or should)—we must seriously consider a return to the firing squad.

The Poetic Torture-House Of Language

Slavoj Žižek, Poetry Foundation

Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city — rather sensible advice, judging from this post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets’ dangerous dreams.

The Spirit Of Youth

Morgan Meis, The Smart Set

So, what about those young children, sitting on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum, learning about Futurism by moving black shapes around on construction paper? Aren’t these children doing exactly the opposite of what Marinetti envisioned for his glorious new civilization?

Loving Animals To Death

James McWilliams, The American Scholar

How can we raise them humanely and then butcher them?

I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis To A Print Content Farm

Joseph Stromberg, Slate

A trip through the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.

When Is A Joke Too Soon? A Scientific Inquiry.

Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, Slate

When is it too soon to joke about something—and when is it too late? Dilemmas like the one The Onion faced led Peter McGraw, the academic half of our duo, to wonder if it might be possible to quantify when, exactly, jokes about a touchy subject start working—and when they become so worn out they evoke yawns instead of laughs.

Book Review: Man Walks Away And Into Dawn Of Psychiatry In 19Th-century Europe

Marie Arana, Washington Post

Now, imagine a man who travels day after day, relentlessly, not because he wants to or because he is paid to, but because he absolutely has to: because roads are his master, and he their slave. This is what psychiatrists call “dromomania,” ambulatory somnambulism — the traveling fugue. The patient who brought that condition to full clinical light, the most notorious dromomaniac in history, was Jean-Albert Dadas, a gas-fitter who deserted the French army in 1881 and criss-crossed Europe in a trance for five years, making his way on foot to Berlin, Prague, Moscow, even Constantinople.

He had no memory of it.

You’re Not As Busy As You Say You Are

Hanna Rosin, Slate

The art of busyness is to convey genuine alarm at the pace of your life and a helpless resignation, as if someone else is setting the clock, and yet simultaneously make it clear that you are completely on top of your game. These are not exactly humble brags. They are more like fretful brags, and they are increasingly becoming the idiom of our age.

Playing With Plato

Clancy Martin, The Atlantic

Philosophers eager to write for popular audiences are finding readers who want answers science can’t offer.

Where Did All The Risk Takers Go?

Chris Lee, Ars Technica

The impact of risky research cannot be overstated, so a plea to nurture risk takers seems obvious. But, exactly who are we pleading with here? Most governments are largely hands-off when it comes to disbursing funds for scientific research. The people who decide if Jane Scientist gets some money are John and Jenny Scientist. So, why are scientists themselves so unwilling to give money to truly risky ideas?

Lessons From The Little Ice Age

Geoffrey Parker, New York Times

Climate alone did not cause all the catastrophes of the 17th century, but it exacerbated many of them.

Book Review: The Poets’ Wives By David Park

Holly Williams, The Independent

They say that behind every great man, there’s a great woman … and the cliché gains weight when it comes to poets: we’re in thrall to the idea of both the muse and the helpmate, the romantic inspiration and the dutiful supporter.

Book Review: 'The Book Of Duels' Absorbing, Complex

Michael Kardos, The Clarion-Ledger

“The Book of Duels,” Michael Garriga’s book of flash fiction, spins on a simple, intriguing premise: 33 deadly duels, narrated by the duelers themselves in first-person interior monologues.

‘Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time’ By Brigid Schulte

Jennifer Howard, Washington Post

This brain-eating assault of to-dos leaves its victims wrung out, joyless, too tired to stop and smell the roses (which probably need pruning and mulching anyway — add that to the list). But “this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting,” Brigid Schulte writes early in “Overwhelmed,” her unexpectedly liberating investigation into the plague of busyness that afflicts us. “I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.”

The View From Afar

Masha Gessen, New York Times

Where did it all go wrong? This is the idée fixe of depression, the question that haunts anyone who has ever felt the color drain out of life. This question also underlies much of literature — it can drive writers. And the difference between good writing and a writing exercise is in fact very much like the difference between life itself and its depressive moments: It is in the complexity, the texture, the expansiveness, the lack of desire to fixate on the moment when it all went off the rails.

Think You Know Ugly? Think Again

Lisa Hix, Collectors Weekly

You might feel revolted by an object, but if you try to objectively explain why it is ugly, it’s harder than you think. Most people are influenced by the dominant tastes and fashion sensibilities of their generation, class, and ethnic group, and when you remove those factors from the equation, an exact, universal definition of “ugliness” becomes almost impossible to pin down.

Why Cities Work Even When Washington Doesn't

James Fallows, The Atlantic

The good news, which my wife and I have been surprised by as we’ve traveled in smaller-town America these past few months, is that once you look away from the national level, the American style of self-government can seem practical-minded, nonideological, future-oriented, and capable of compromise. These are of course the very traits we seem to have lost in our national politics.

Elegy For A Country’s Seasons

Zadie Smith, The New York Review Of Books

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated.

Do Spoilers For Books Actually Improve Them?

Claire Armitstead, The Guardian

Reviewers have been carefully eliding Karen Joy Fowler's latest plot, but she doesn't seem to care and nor, apparently, do we.

The Edible Atlas: Around The World In 39 Cuisines – Review

Sam Leith, The Guardian

Here is a nice idea for a cookery book, amiably executed and attractively plated up. Mina Holland has produced what you'd hesitate to call a whistle-stop tour – perhaps the metaphor should be a dim sum or tapas-style feast – of a number of the world's different cuisines. She is interested in how these styles of cooking draw on local ingredients and traditions, they way they sit in the culture and, above all, the way in which they have cross-fertilised with other food cultures. "Food typifies everything that is different about another culture and gives the most authentic insight into how people live," she writes on the first page of her introduction, which is a bit of an overstatement but gives a flavour of the project.

The History Of The Veggie Burger

K. Annabelle Smith, Smithsonian Magazine

The London-based natural food restaurant owner called it the “VegeBurger” when it first hit the market. Though recipes for a “vegetable burger” without meat have been cited in print as early as 1969, when Sams released his product in 1982, the word “Vege” or what Americans now know as “veggie,” was a relatively new thing—in fact, it didn’t enter the lexicon until the late ’70s.

A 26-Story History Of San Francisco

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic

This is the story of 140 New Montgomery, but the building is also a way of thinking about the history and future of the city.

The World's Smallest Time Machine Is Still Pretty Big

Jason Sheehan, NPR

The lineup in this book is like the guest list for the greatest cocktail party of all time — writers modern and not so, alive and dead, known tinkerers with the time stream and those who just got it in their heads one day to go back in time and kiss their great-grandmothers or whatever.

Read Yourself To Sleep … If You Dare

David Barnett, The Guardian

Literature has a long relationship with sleep, whether too much or too little, but recent novels take insomnia into the realms of terror.

Book Review: Yiyun Li’s ‘Kinder Than Solitude’ Dives Into The Weight Of Memory

Marie Arana, Washington Post

Memory is a one-way lane. Going down it, we summon faces from the past: old loves, lost friends, long-vanished relatives, our own young selves. We seldom imagine that our faces will haunt others in return. Or so says Yiyun Li in this sleek, powerful novel about the weight of memory, the brunt of loss and the myriad ways the past can crimp a soul.

“Ha!” Takes A Serious Look At Humor

Florence Williams, New York Times

Though animals laugh, humans spend more time laughing than exhibiting any other emotion. But what gives some people a better sense of humor than others?

The De Man Case

Louis Menand, New Yorker

Does a critic’s past explain his criticism?

How The Elevator Transformed America

Leon Neyfakh, The Boston Globe

An associate professor of history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and a board member of the Elevator Museum in Queens, Wilk would like everyone to be more conscious of the elevators in their lives. But he is particularly disappointed with his fellow academics—people who are supposed to be studying how the world works—for failing to consider just how much elevators matter.

‘Kinder Than Solitude’ By Yiyun Li

John Freeman, The Boston Globe

One of the four characters who animate “Kinder than Solitude,” the quietly heartbreaking new novel by Yiyun Li, works at a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts. It’s not hard to imagine the place: a bland office park, probably tucked off Route 2. The sort of building one does not notice unless traffic has stopped.

All day long Moran, as Li’s character is called, sits alone in a room quality testing health and hygiene products. Many people would be bored by such work. Moran, however, is grateful. “Though her life lacked the poignancy of great happiness and acute pain, she believed she had found, in their places, the blessing of solitude.”

Operators Are Standing By

Colson Whitehead, New York Times

The novel is dead. The memoir is dead. The short story is twitching. The author is getting ripe. Who can keep up? Have you ever wished for a new literary form, impervious to the ins and outs of critical fashion and the latest manifesto? Ever pine for a writing genre that escapes trendy labels and confounds reviewers who take their personal enthusiasm for universal values?

Meet the LitMode 100.

Elegy For A Country’s Seasons

Zadie Smith, The New York Review Of Books

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated.

A Passage From Hong Kong

Maya Jasanoff, The New York Review Of Books

Imagine the Empire State Building. Now imagine tipping it on its side, nudging it into the Hudson, and putting out to sea. That was the scale of thing I contemplated one day in late November, as I gaped at the immense navy hull of CMA CGM Christophe Colomb, one of the world’s largest container ships, which stretched above and out of sight on either side of me, on a quayside in Hong Kong.

No One Cares About Your Novel: So Writers, Don’t Be Boring!

Laura Miller, Salon

MFA programs struggle to teach writers the most important lesson of all: You are not owed readers.

How Apple's iOS 7.1 Finally Quelled Users' Motion Sickness

Craig Grannell, The Guardian

Animations introduced in Apple’s new look for its iPhone and iPad interface in September made some feel physically sick. Now, it’s fixed them.

Opera From The Other Side

Philip Gossett, The New York Review Of Books

To write the history of opera production, not only must one know the repertory well, but one needs to understand the extraordinary work of the many people involved backstage who make an operatic spectacle function. Few people are as capable of writing such a history as Evan Baker, who has worked as a dramaturge and stage director for decades. Baker understands the changes that have accompanied operatic spectacles in modern times, as nonmusical influences have become an increasingly prominent aspect of the performance.

The Engineering Of The Chain Restaurant Menu

Megan Garber, The Atlantic

At IHOP and Applebee's, menus are sales documents. And navigational guides. And explainers.

In 'Googleplex,' Plato Makes A Bid For Continuing Importance

Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR

Today's existential dilemmas sound different than yesteryear's, but they're made of the same stuff. Or so argues Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. In this book, the philosopher is literally dropped into the 21st century to demonstrate his relevance, debating Google engineers and talk-show hosts.

How Am I Supposed To Talk To You

Lauren Holmes, Granta

'Back From The Brink'

Lloyd Sederer, The Huffington Post

When you open the cover of this book you first see a copy of a handwritten suicide note, penned by the author in 2004. The PS of the note reads "I just can't be a burden any longer."

Hollywood At War

David Denby, New Yorker

Five major directors with a mission.

This Is The Way The World Ends: How The Cosmos Will Meet Its Demise

Stephen Batersby, Salon

The future ain’t what it used to be. Cosmologists were once confident they knew how the universe would end: it would just fade away. An ever colder, ever dimmer cosmos would slowly wind down until there were only cinders where the stars once shone. But that’s history.

Today’s science suggests many different possible futures. Cosmic cycles of death and rebirth might be on the cards, or a very peculiar end when the vacuum of space suddenly turns into something altogether different. The universe might collapse back in on itself in a big crunch. Or we could be in for an even more violent end called the big rip. Or a weird pixellation—the big snap. Or find our whole universe pouring down a wormhole (the big trip). The slow drift into darkness is still a contender, but fear not: that long night could be a lot more interesting than you might think—imagine the cosmos filled with giant diamonds.

‘All Our Names’ By Dinaw Mengestu

John Freeman, The Boston Globe

One of the most precious gifts Chinua Achebe left for writers was the permission to be singularly individual. “Things Fall Apart” will be read next week, and it will be read next century because it does not seek to define Nigerian humanity or Nigerian suffering. It is a book about a man and his family in a time of change. And by showing the many false ways identity gets inscribed, the novel explodes the categorizing prisons of differing identity.

The ‘Boys’ In The Bunkhouse

Dan Barry, New York Times

Toil, abuse and endurance in the heartland.

National Zoo’s Longest-serving Keeper Bids Farewell

Rachel Manteuffel, Washington Post

On his last night as the longest-serving keeper at the National Zoo, David S. Kessler checks and rechecks the locks on the enclosures in the Small Mammal House. He collects his farewell gifts and mementos and softly narrates to himself what needs to be done. “Okay, lights out here, good. Hi, babies!” he says to Reuben and Jolla, the howler monkey couple. “Aagh, g’night, sweetheart. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.” He checks the seven timers on the lights, saying “timer” aloud at each. He’s not thinking, he says, about how this January night is the last time after 39 years, two-thirds of his life, at the zoo. Now Gus the rock hyrax — who looks like a four-pound guinea pig but is more closely related to the elephant — catches his attention in the dark. It’s as if the little guy knows something is up.

Book Review: ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,’ By Elizabeth Kolbert

Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times

Elizabeth Kolbert’s revelatory new book, The Sixth Extinction, about the rapid and radical changes man is wreaking on the Earth, is a work of explanatory journalism that achieves the highest and best use of the form. After you read it, your view of the world will be fundamentally changed.

Is The LRB One Of The Best Magazines In The World?

Elizabeth Day, The Guardian

The London Review of Books has become the most successful – and controversial – literary publication in Europe. Just what is Mary-Kay Wilmers, its 75-year-old editor, getting so right?

Book Review: ‘Accidental Universe’ By Alan Lightman A Page-turner

Joan Silverman, Maine Sunday Telegram

Philosophy and science are typically the stuff of textbooks, not page-turners. But Alan Lightman’s engaging new book of essays proves to be the exception. Indeed this MIT physicist-turned-bestselling author is one of the nation’s top science writers, exploring the intersection of science and culture. That he used to teach physics in the morning, and creative writing in the afternoon is all the recommendation you need.

Why It’s Impossible To Re-create A Film Shot By Shot

Richard Brody, New Yorker

It’s the micro-gestures, the inner sense of bearing, that ring most strangely in Gus Van Sant’s version of “Psycho.” But those micro-gestures actually occur on both sides of the camera.

Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney

Ron Suskind, New York Times

We ask our growing team of developmental specialists, doctors and therapists about it. We were never big fans of plopping our kids in front of Disney videos, but now the question seemed more urgent: Is this good for him? They shrug. Is he relaxed? Yes. Does it seem joyful? Definitely. Keep it limited, they say. But if it does all that for him, there’s no reason to stop it.

No, His Name Is Not Ted

David Hochman, New York Times

At 57, Mr. Anderson, the British former magazine publisher and Internet entrepreneur who took over the organization in 2001 and built it into a multimedia colossus, is in many ways the embodiment of his famous ideas organization. Like the TED Talks millions love, and some love to rip apart, Mr. Anderson is high-minded but sometimes inaccessible, forward thinking to the point of “whoa,” and so earnest it can be easy to smirk.

But as the 30th anniversary TED Conference this month in Vancouver, British Columbia, approaches, Mr. Anderson, forever mild-mannered, is quietly celebrating all he’s accomplished with those three red letters, even as some sniff that the organization has become the Starbucks of intellectual conglomerates.

Book Review: 'Dinosaurs Without Bones' By Anthony J. Martin

Brian Switek, Wall Street Journal

In "Dinosaurs Without Bones," Emory University's Anthony Martin draws on a wealth of fossil clues, from footprints to feces, to explore Mesozoic lives and the field of ichnology, the study of trace fossils. Records of prehistoric behavior and biology, such fossils are often the closest we'll ever come to seeing long-extinct dinosaurs in the flesh.

Too Many Cooks

Jenny Rosenstrach, New York Times

Three words for you: Food Nerds Unite.

She Walked Into My Office On A Tuesday, Dressed In Chandler

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Among the tentative book and story titles that Raymond Chandler left behind were “The Diary of a Loud Check Suit,” “The Man With the Shredded Ear,” “Stop Screaming — It’s Me” and “The Black-Eyed Blonde.” So we can be glad that last one became Chandler’s latest gift from beyond the grave: a much slinkier moniker that summons Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the kinds of women who matched wits with him, slyly wrapping him around their dainty, lacquered fingers.

'Black Moon' Imagines A Sleepless American Nightmare

Jason Heller, NPR

"It was a great time for storytellers," says Matthew Biggs, the central character in Kenneth Calhoun's haunting debut novel, Black Moon. The irony of his comment comes with a horrific aftertaste: The world is suffering from a sudden, unexplainable pandemic that's made everyone a perpetual insomniac.

Zombie Studies Gain Ground On College Campuses

Erica E> Phillips, Wall Street Journal

Kyle Bishop figured it was risky when he applied to a University of Arizona Ph.D. program in English eight years ago by proposing a dissertation on zombie movies.

He was dead wrong.

Ramen’s Big Splash

Pete Wells, New York Times

The first rule of the serious ramen hunter: look everywhere, even in places that don’t look like ramen shops. This is how, in January, I found myself inhaling noodles at a cluster of tables shoved into the center of a bagel shop in Long Island City, Queens.

Project Flame

Ted Sutton, Slate

In 1966, I started one of the world’s first computer dating services. One problem: I had no computer.

Book Review: Season To Taste Or How To Eat Your Husband By Natalie Young

Leyla Sanai, The Independent

What do you do with a husband who says that the cakes you’re baking for your new business are “fundamentally poor owing to a lack of imagination in their creator”? Well, if you’re Lizzie Prain, 53-year-old heroine of Natalie Young’s new book, you whack him across the back of the head with a spade, axe him up, butcher his body, and then eat it in various recipes.

The Sound Of Difference

Bernd Brunner, The Smart Set

Why we find some languages more beautiful than others.

My Character To Kill

Alex Berenson, New York Times

But I’m not sure I can say goodbye to a man whom I know so intimately, who has defined my creative life for so long — and who will pay the mortgage for at least one more contract. Putting Wells in the ground would wake me to my own mortality as much as his. After all our years together, at least I know what he would choose. He’s not afraid to die with his boots on.

Stop Defending The Humanities

Simon During, Public Books

It turns out that the humanities’ defensive accounts of themselves have some rather curious features. In particular, they tend to pass quickly over what we tacitly know about them as a matter of fact, turning instead to the sermonic. And in insisting on the humanities’ value for society and culture as a whole, these accounts routinely fail to confront their own interest in making this case.

‘The Weirdness’ By Jeremy Bushnell

Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe

“The Weirdness” isn’t a high-concept satire of the literary scene or a fable about the queasy intersection of artistic integrity and worldly success. It’s, well, weirder (and more entertaining) than that. What emerges instead is an utterly charming, silly, and heartily entertaining coming-of-age story about a man-boy who learns to believe in himself by reckoning with evil.

After The Poisoning

Marian Ryan, Slate

An unconsoling novel of four Chinese teens and the incident that changes their lives.

Bitcoin Is As Good As Gold. That’s Bad.

Richard S. Grossman, Slate

Bitcoin is as good as gold. For a monetary standard, that is not very good.

‘Act Of Killing’ Film Fails To Stir Indonesia

Joe Cochrane, New York Times

The American director of the chilling Indonesian documentary “The Act of Killing” has won dozens of awards so far for the film and could add one of the movie industry’s most coveted honors Sunday at the Oscars.

But so far, the director, Joshua Oppenheimer, has not succeeded in accomplishing what he considered a greater goal — jump-starting a debate in Indonesia that will compel the government to finally open a formal inquiry into one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.

The Box

Vona Groarke, The Guardian

Illicit Intermissions

Judith Flanders, The Times Literary Supplement

For the relationship between dance and literature is not merely “one of the most striking but understudied features of modernism”, but one of reciprocity: dance drew on modern literature as much as modern literature was shaped by dance.

Book Review: 'The Broken Road' By Patrick Leigh Fermor

Robert D. Kaplan, Wall Street Journal

The greatest 20th-century Britons often had a bit of the 19th century in them, if not, at times, the spirit of antiquity.

With E-Book Appeal, Apple Sets Its Sights On The Supreme Court

Dimitra Kessenides, Bloomberg

The appellate brief, in arguing that Judge Cote’s ruling contradicts other Supreme Court and Second Circuit decisions in price-fixing cases, leaves no doubt that Boutrous and his team at Gibson, Dunn are teeing the case up for Supreme Court review, should it come to that.

All One Breath By John Burnside – Review

Sarah Crown, The Guardian

We may be surrounded by people, Burnside suggests, but when the chips are down, we're on our own, "out at the end of winter, turning away / to where the dark begins, far in the trees". It's an image that sums up the collection's spirit: this is a mid-life, dark woods kind of a book; death-haunted and offering precious little in the way of comfort.