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Where literature meets life
“The future of search is verbs.” This is what Bill Gates told Esther Dyson over dinner, and what Esther Dyson told us at Big Think’s Google v. Bing/Farsight 2011: Beyond the Searchbox event today in California. Dyson, possibly the coolest woman in the world—certainly one of them—was predictably ...
The Tiger Mom went to Davos; of course she did. And what did she say? And why do we care? Has her Battle Hymn hit a tipping point, and will future historians consider its tipping point finely aligned with the tipping point of Davos itself? Both the book and the event propose philosophies of ...
“A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect,” is how Adam Haslett puts it in his piece, “The Art of Good Writing,” in the Weekend FT. Haslett, one of his generation’s finest writers, divines sentences at no risk of neglect, or illness. But his piece is provocative. He does not say that ...
If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, would he be counseling us on how to find happiness, or would he merely be setting an example of how to produce it in others? One aspect of King’s genius was making emotion with words. He took concepts (“a dream”), made them musical with language, and ...
In a post on the New York Review of Books website, historian Garry Wills again compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln, a comparison uniquely compelling when assessed by Wills, our most interesting mind on the first American President from Illinois. The parallels felt truly new in the wake of yesterday’s ...
Morning Joe ’s Joe Scarborough reminded us today of another time, another tragedy, and another response: the speech given by Robert F. Kennedy the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In a world before blogs, Kennedy was in the awkward, yet history-making position of having to break news ...
If the following combination of names has meaning to you, the answer is yes: Desean, Lesean, Jeremy, Michael, Brent. Football and philosophy don’t often share the same Op-Ed column, but today they did, and thinking on this relationship, we think that a future generation of philosophers might align ...
So he will write a book, even if he does not want to write a book. “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” Assange said, and the Huffington Post reported. Whether or not this protestation seems absurd, the book will be widely anticipated and really widely read; two of the world’s finest ...
He didn’t look back. David Remnick’s recent thoughts on the Khodorjovsky trial, its parallels—and non-parallels—to an earlier Soviet prosecution (of poet Josef Brodsky) made us think about poets, diplomats, and businessmen. And then the world lost a man who was all of these things: Ambassador ...
It is the perfect time for teenagers who love writing, and writers, to have an outlet for their creativity: they are, or soon will be, reading Salinger in class, and now those among them most excited about the story-telling process have a place to go and to share with others like them. Figment.com ...
The leaks are catastrophic. The leaks are not catastrophic. Diplomacy's at risk. Diplomacy's redeemed. While we develop the questions and wait for the answers, let’s parse another, less quixotic topic than the meaning of "journalist:" year-end literary lists. These lists provide different ...
Why should he be afraid of Julian Assange? (We might well assume he is not afraid of anyone.) But Mr. Putin’s classically Slavic cool when addressing what he termed “not a catastrophe” was important. One might even say it represents a tipping point in the WikiLeaks story. Increasingly, the wisest ...
The stories intertwine on the point of personality: is Mark Zuckerberg a genius? Is Julian Assange? At what point does (at least in Aaron Sorkin’s vision of the Facebook founder, now immortalized by David Fincher’s film) the irony of someone socially maladroit creating the ultimate social network ...
Maureen Dowd brought it up, but we are happy she did: it’s an excellent time to remember Kipling, and in particular to remember his most celebrated line from “Arithmetic on the Frontier:” Ten thousand pounds of education falls to a ten-rupee jizail. These lines captured the essential aspect of the ...
Or, could Call of Duty: Black Ops take precedence on syllabi over The Illiad? This question has fresh relevance when considering Charlie Crist’s current dilemma: to pardon, or not, the late Doors singer, Jim Morrison. Morrison was a poet, after all. And the question of whether Morrison’s hip ...