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'I Feel Lost In Hong Kong': Why Travel Writer Paul Theroux Finds The City 'Impenetrable'

Fionnuala McHugh, South China Morning Post

"I feel lost in Hong Kong. I don't know how you'd write about it, it's impenetrable. There's so much of it … I don't mean writing about the restaurants and hotels, I mean about the city itself. You'd have to live here to do that."

Board Games Are Back, And Boston’s A Player

Ethan Gilsdorf, The Boston Globe

It turns out plenty of people still play board games. Not only grade-schoolers and nerds, but average folk who partake at home, in game cafes, and at massive conventions. Feeding their appetite is a new wave of board, card, dice, and so-called Eurogames (also known as designer games, they originated in Europe and emphasize strategy, not luck). Quirky, challenging, and innovative, with themes ranging from pirates to pandemics to power brokers, their chunky boxes and metal tins are emblazoned with names like Small World, Eldritch Horror, Sushi Go!, Iota, and Cards Against Humanity.

Can Mushrooms Treat Depression?

Eugenia Bone, New York Times

The fact that under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way may be medically significant in treating psychological disorders like depression. “When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,” Dr. Expert said. “One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a ‘proper’ functioning of the brain can be helpful.” Think of it as tripping a breaker or rebooting your computer.

How Not To Get Away With Murder

Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine

Nancy and Frank Howard were happily married for three decades. Then he fell in love with another woman, embezzled $30 million, and hired a hit man to kill her.

I Refuse By Per Petterson Review – A Masterful Study Of Time

Neel Mukherjee, The Guardian

Petterson’s great theme is time and how we experience it. This has a direct bearing on how narrative positions and unspools itself in relation to the consciousness of time, and on how a writer represents human interiority perceiving it.

‘Stalin,’ By Stephen Kotkin

Jennifer Siegel, New York Times

“Stalin” is a complex work, demanding a dedicated reader. Kotkin himself almost despairs of the challenges he faced in narrating the complicated and fractured tale of revolution, civil war and reconstruction.

Angela’s Assets

Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair

She may be the world’s most powerful woman, but German chancellor Angela Merkel has governed with the utmost caution—one of several contradictions that make her an enigma at home and abroad.

Garlic With Everything

Donald Hall, New Yorker

In the old days, New Hampshire’s food was almost as ruinous as England’s.

Book Review: ‘The Book Of Strange New Things,’ By Michel Faber

Ron Charles, Washington Post

For all its galactic wonders, “The Book of Strange New Things” is a subtle, meditative novel that winds familiar space-alien tropes around terrestrial reflections on faith and devotion.

Do Online Death Threats Count As Free Speech?

Emily Bazelon, New York Times

In essence, the court will have to decide what matters more: one person’s freedom to express violent rage, or another person’s freedom to live without the burden of fear?

The legal issue is connected to a larger question: how to deal with the frequent claim that online speech is a special form of playacting, in which a threat is as unreal as an attack on an avatar in World of Warcraft.

When G.M. Was Google

Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker

The art of the corporate devotional.

Book World: ‘The Girl Next Door’ By Ruth Rendell

Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post

Ruth Rendell’s fiction clusters at such a high level that the best judgment I can render about “The Girl Next Door” is this: It’s a good Rendell, and that makes it very good indeed.

Poem Of The Week: Canada By Katherine Stansfield

Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Where The Fuck Is Princess Leia?

Glynnis MacNicol, Medium

Help me, multi-gazillion dollar toy industry, you’re my only hope.

What I Discovered By Visiting Every Disney Park

Brooks Barnes, New York Times

What motivates men and women (usually traveling without children) to spend their time and money this way? It can’t just be that they really, really love Pirates of the Caribbean and the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. What kind of person, having already ridden Space Mountain a few dozen times in Florida, flies to Paris and spends an afternoon riding Space Mountain? Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Deranged.

Or so I thought. Confession: Having visited all 13 parks, I am now a full-fledged member of this obsessive Mickey Mouse Club.

The Real Roots Of Midlife Crisis

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic

What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age.

Stephen King’s ‘Revival’

Danielle Trussoninov, New York Times

Reading “Revival” is experiencing a master storyteller having the time of his life. All of his favorite fictional elements are at play — small-town Maine, the supernatural, the evil genius, the obsessive addict, the power of belief to transform a life.

The Group That Rules The Web

Paul Ford, New Yorker

You might have read that, on October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5. And you might know that this has something to do with apps and the Web. The question is: Does this concern you?

Stop Trying To Save The World

Michael Hobbes, New Republic

Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort of Mad Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick expansion, failure.

Book review: ‘Deep Dark Down,’ by Héctor Tobar

Noah Gallagher Shannon, Washington Post

Miners have a rule: Nobody walks anywhere alone. A slab of rock can peel off suddenly and imprison a man for days. Or a miner can step, without the warning of a shadow, into a fatal crevasse. The buddy system is an expression of the profession’s perils and, ironically, also the limits of its safety: What happens when every man’s life is in danger?

The Secret Life Of Passwords

Ian Urbina, New York Times

We despise them – yet we imbue them with our hopes and dreams, our dearest memories, our deepest meanings. They unlock much more than our accounts.

Read This And Feel Better – How Inspirational Guff Invaded Our Lives

Paula Cocozza, The Guardian

On the underground, on coffee shop sandwich boards and especially out of the mouths of The Apprentice candidates: inspirational quotes are everywhere. What’s going on? And do they really help?

Why I Am Teaching A Course Called “Wasting Time On The Internet”

Keneth Goldsmith, New Yorker

The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, and, most important, cut-and-pastable, it’s easily reassembled into works of art.

The Programmer’s Price

Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker

Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent.

Let’s All Be A Lot Less Honest: Lena Dunham, Naked Selfies, And The Irony Of Oversharing

R. Jay Magill Jr., Salon

It's time to drop our authenticity fetish and get real about the neglected art of playing social roles.

Back To The Future — The Grim, Grimy, Chrome-Coated Future

Jason Sheehan, NPR

But if you can open wide enough to swallow the thing whole and accept it for what it was when it was bright and young, Kadrey's 26-year-old debut still has a magnetic, psychotic charm. And for those of you who come to it just for Kadrey's name on the cover, look close and you can see, buried under the clutter of floppy disks, AK-47s and CRT monitors, hints of the writer he was striving to become.

Book Review: ‘The Meaning Of Human Existence’ By Edward O. Wilson

Scott Russell Sanders, Washington Post

Ironically, the religious faiths that are the chief source of this skepticism are themselves a product of evolution, Wilson tells us in this slender volume, which has been short-listed for this year’s National Book Award in nonfiction. Following Darwin’s lead, he argues that natural selection operates not only at the individual level but also at the level of groups. Throughout our evolutionary history, those groups that bonded most firmly against outsiders enjoyed greater reproductive success — and religion is the most potent binding force that human cultures have produced.

Extreme Wealth Is Bad For Everyone—Especially The Wealthy

Michael Lewis, New Republic

And I think it is: there is a growing awareness that the yawning gap between rich and poor is no longer a matter of simple justice but also the enemy of economic success and human happiness. It’s not just bad for the poor. It’s also bad for the rich. It’s funny, when you think about it, how many rich people don’t know this. But they are not idiots; they can learn.

The Doughnut Burger Makes Sense – Apart From The Doughnut Bit

Zoe Williams, The Guardian

It was mid-afternoon when I went into my first Hungry Horse, on a roundabout in Telford, and I was starving. I actually started on the chips before the photographer had got his lenses sorted. “Don’t eat those!” said his eyes, beseechingly. “You’ll never finish the burger!” He had only just met me, and couldn’t have known that I finish everything.

The American Lover By Rose Tremain Review – Loners, London And Lust

Gerard Woodward, The Guardian

This collection of short stories about isolation and loneliness is powerful and wide-ranging.

Bonfire Of The Inanities

Jacqui Shine, The Awl

So gay! So girly! The history of the Styles section of the New York ‘Times’—and the real New Journalism.

In The Thrall Of An Electric Preacher: Stephen King's 'Revival'

Janet Maslin, New York Times

The trifecta of “Joyland” (2013), “Mr. Mercedes” and now “Revival,” the best of the bunch, finds him writing with the infectious glee that has always been at the heart of his popular success.

Quality Control: A Short Story

Edwidge Danticat, Washington Post

Gloria: A Short Story

Alice McDermott, Washington Post

All We Can Do: A Short Story

T.M. Shine, Washington Post

Why Read New Books?

Tim Parks, The New York Review Of Books

“Into thirty centuries born,” Edwin Muir began his most celebrated poem, “At home in them all but the very last.” Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

What It Takes To Be The French Jennifer Lawrence

Mac McClelland, Medium

The artists of France’s voiceover industry are beloved, well-paid, and secretive. Now if they can only survive le déluge of Netflix.

Mindsuckers: Meet Nature's Nightmare

Carl Zimmer, Photographs by Anand Varma, Graphic Novellas by Matthew Twombly, National Geographic Magazine

It is as astonishing as it is sad to watch a ladybug turn into a zombie. Normally ladybugs are sophisticated and voracious predators. A single individual may devour several thousand aphids in a lifetime. To find a victim, it first waves its antennae to detect chemicals that plants release when they’re under attack by herbivorous insects. Once it has homed in on these signals, the ladybug switches its sensory scan to search for molecules released only by aphids. Then it creeps up and strikes, ripping the aphid apart with barbed mandibles.

Learning How Little We Know About The Brain

James Gorman, New York Times

Yet the growing body of data — maps, atlases and so-called connectomes that show linkages between cells and regions of the brain — represents a paradox of progress, with the advances also highlighting great gaps in understanding.

Book Review: ‘Revival,’ By Stephen King

Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post

Stephen King’s splendid new novel, “Revival,” offers the atavistic pleasure of drawing closer to a campfire in the dark to hear a tale recounted by someone who knows exactly how to make every listener’s flesh crawl when he whispers, “Don’t look behind you.”

The Alaska Of Giants And Gods

Dave Eggers, New Yorker

In A Multiverse, What Are The Odds?

Natalie Wolchover and Peter Bryne, Quanta Magazine

Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.

Going Topless, Tig Notaro Takes Over Town Hall

Jason Zinoman, New York Times

Comedians often show audiences their scars, but never so literally. The point here was not merely to shock, as quickly became clear. In fact, it was to convince us that there is nothing to be shocked about. For the next 30 minutes, Ms. Notaro told jokes so funny and involving that any anxiety or tension in the room disappeared.

The Sins Of The Father

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Such themes give this autobiographical fiction a broader national significance. But Mr. Modiano is also profoundly regionalist. For all his stories’ ambiguities, Paris’s streets and sights are transcribed with emphatic specificity.

The Unbelievable Skepticism Of The Amazing Randi

Adam Higginbotham, New York Times

The Million Dollar Challenge was the climax of the Amazing Meeting, or TAM, an annual weekend-long conference for skeptics that was created by a magician named the Amazing Randi in 2003. Randi, a slight, gnomish figure with a bald head and frothy white beard, was presiding from the front row, a cane topped with a polished silver skull between his legs. He drummed his fingers on the table in front of him.

Jennifer Egan: ‘Writing Is An Act Of Faith’ Against The Rise Of Technology

Sarah Galo, The Guardian

“Anxiety about the future of reading is something we can’t think about when we write. It’s an existential feeling that can hinder us, so it’s better to forget and keep writing. It is this hope that the practice of writing, and reading, matters that should motivate us.”

Johanna Skibsrud’s ‘Quartet For The End Of Time’

Andrea Thompson, New York Times

In digressive, sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes obfuscatory prose, she examines the complexity of human relationships and the myriad ways in which identity can be malleable.

Revival By Stephen King Review – Stephen King Returns To The Horror Genre

Alison Flood, The Guardian

King has always been good at the buildup to horror: the reveal of the monster behind the curtains doesn’t always match the promise. In Revival, however, it’s more of a curtain twitch, and all the more memorable for it.

The War Of The Words

Keith Gessen, Vanity Fair

How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money?

Reading A Poem: 20 Strategies

Mark Yakich, The Atlantic

But what if the fine art of reading poetry isn’t so fine after all? What if the predicament about poems is precisely our well-intentioned but ill-fitting dispositions toward reading them?

‘Prune’ The Cookbook: Where’s The appeal?

Bonnie S. Benwick, Washington Post

When a cookbook raises as many questions as it answers, will it generate more buzzkill than buzz? With the Nov. 4 publication of Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Prune,” we’ll find out soon enough.

‘The Burning Room’ By Michael Connelly

Daneet Steffens, The Boston Globe

A fine balancing act between thought and action on Bosch’s part, “The Burning Room” offers a nuanced, nicely-honed performance from Connelly as well.

He’s Glad You Asked

Kenneth Chang, New York Times

“They say there are no stupid questions,” Mr. Munroe, now 30, writes. “That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid.

“But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”

Why So Many People Loved Tom Magliozzi’s Storytelling

Roy Peter Clark, Poynter

Part of their genius was to latch themselves on to something huge and almost universal. It could have been music, food, or live. In their case it was THE CAR. Their interest of course, was not just the car, but all of the human relationships the car enabled or distressed.

The Internet’s First Family

Stephen Thomas, Hazlitt

MetaFilter began in 1999 as a sort of humane proto-Reddit. Why did a site for sharing "best of the web" links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways?

My Grandma The Poisoner

John Reed, Vice

People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

The Chapter: A History

Nicolas Dames, New Yorker

The chapter is tied intimately to our notions of literacy, as signalled by the fact that we give the name “chapter books” to the texts that offer school-age children their first mature reading experiences. More than this, the chapter has become a way of looking at the world, a way of dividing time and, therefore, of dividing experience. Its origins date back to long before the printing press or even the bound codex, back to the emergence of prose in antiquity as both an expressive and an informational medium. Literary evolution rarely seems slower than it does in the case of the chapter. What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?

William Gibson Skypes The Future In 'The Peripheral'

Jason Sheenan, NPR

It's the good stuff. The classic stuff. Digging into The Peripheral is a little like a sneak trip to the past, remembering that first, sweet shock of the new. Like wandering into some spectral record shop and discovering an undiscovered pre-first-album Ramones demo bright with all that antique rage and pain and anarchic joy. Right from the start, I wanted to climb inside of it and never come out.

Daniel Kehlmann’s ‘F’

Joseph Salvatore, New York Times

As with Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” or Tom McCarthy’s “C,” in Daniel Kehlmann’s subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and characters alike exist for a time in that hazy, uncertain land, where there is not only the desire but the need to solve for x — or, in Kehlmann’s case, “F” — a need to assign value, to accord meaning, to map connections, to know the mind of the creator.

Why Innocent People Plead Guilty

Jed S. Rakoff, The New York Review Of Books

The practice of plea bargaining never really took hold in most other countries, where it was viewed as a kind of “devil’s pact” that allowed guilty defendants to avoid the full force of the law. But in the United States it became commonplace. And while the Supreme Court initially expressed reservations about the system of plea bargaining, eventually the Court came to approve of it, as an exercise in contractual negotiation between independent agents (the prosecutor and the defense counsel) that was helpful in making the system work. Similarly, academics, though somewhat bothered by the reduced role of judges, came to approve of plea bargaining as a system somewhat akin to a regulatory regime.

Radio Dusts Off Mistletoe, In October

Ben Sisario, New York Times

Even in the age of Pandora and Spotify, the all-holiday format has remained one of radio’s most enduring and profitable gimmicks, with hundreds of stations luring listeners with endless loops of “Feliz Navidad” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” In the last decade, the number of stations embracing the format has nearly doubled, and competition between broadcasters often leads to stations turning earlier and earlier.

How Boston Is Rethinking Its Relationship With The Sea

Joanna Jolly, BBC

Sea levels are rising, the land is sinking. It's going to become a big problem for some cities on the US East Coast, so in Boston people are thinking the unthinkable - copying Venice and Amsterdam, and becoming a city of canals.