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Where literature meets life
Today, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Salvatore Augustine Giunta. This is the first time a living soldier has been awarded this honor since Vietnam. It is the nation’s highest military honor. Giunta is twenty-five years old. In the introduction to her 60 Minutes piece on Giunta, CBS ...
There is often a fine line between hagiography and take down in the most artful examples of journalistic profile. The New Yorker’s seductive piece on politician-scholar-soldier-writer -potential future British Prime Minister Rory Stewart stands as the best latest example of the genre. What makes Ian ...
It is Kafka-esque, the Letter from Krasnokamensk Jail, circa 2010: The New York Times has run the Russian oligarch’s statement, the statement he delivered in front of his judge, and in front of the Times’s Joe Nocera, yesterday. It is bone chilling. It has precedence. The man who has spent time ...
Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker piece on Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (and on, more broadly, biography), put it beautifully: “There is no humility in monumental biography. But there is humility in nature, in time, and in history. The same sun that shines on the Bunker Hill monument, Melville ...
In this brief video accompanying their obituary, the New York Times asks Ted Sorenson to discuss his relationship with President Kennedy. It was a relationship without contemporary analog, like Sorenson himself. Remembering his legacy is appropriate today, as so much of America teems with emotion ...
Let us now praise Doonesbury, a body of work and a work of art that could be compared to the Bayeux Tapestry, and which also has been compared, in the new Rolling Stone , to War and Peace. We applaud this comparison; no one does it better than Gary Trudeau. Yet when attempting to define what ...
It is not often that a celebrity memoir makes the leap from the front page of the New York Times Arts section to its Op-Ed page, but then what less would we expect from Keith Richards, at least when “we” is defined as those of us who have loved and followed him and his Stones for an age. Here is a ...
As Foreign Affairs , the sine qua non of policy journals, changes editorial hands, outgoing Editor Jim Hoge has given the world a great gift: a selection of suggestions for What To Read by selected writers, journalists, and policy makers, all of whom have some connection to the magazine. Here is a ...
It is not because Julian Assange reminds us of Errol Morris. It is because Julian Assange reminds us of Robert S. McNamara. His precision and self-assurance are coupled with mission, history, and a noble cause. But will he eventually come, like McNamara did, to regret his actions? Will he ever see ...
One powerful woman picks up the phone. Thomas v. Hill, 2010. We now know that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has called Anita Hill, after twenty years, seemingly to suggest a détente. Is this an act of faith? Is it classic feminine emotional intelligence, perhaps enhanced by a ...
He is charismatic. He is attractive. And perhaps his best weapon is an apparent agnosticism when it comes to the Money/Power manna of classic media moguls. Denton is a mogul, no doubt. His business, Gawker , has become something which matters, even for those who pretend not to know what it is, who ...
Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, in his interview with Big Think , confirms what we know: crime, like global capital markets, is uniquely, irrevocably networked. The rare drug crime might be analyzed in isolation, but most local narcotics markets survive within an international framework of ...
Today’s New York Times reported on the phenomenon of declining picture book sales—for children. Pictures, apparently, are not advanced enough for our little ones, even when they are still in kindergarten. Picture books will not get them into Yale, or Harvard. But this was never the promise of ...
Give them stories. Let them read Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Theodor Dreiser. Let them read Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. And Styron, Roth, Didion, Bellow, Franzen. Open the treasure chest of the finest American authors, and let the prisoners at Guantanamo have access to ...
An companion piece to Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra’s elegant Times Op-Ed on India is Isaac Chotiner’s essay in the Times Book Review on (literary magazine) Granta ’s Pakistan Issue. Chotiner references Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid’s story, “A Beaheading.” Mishra and Hamid are two novelists who ...