Mark Twain’s posthumous autobiography reveals the author’s darker side, but will we bother to notice? Or will we prefer the “Disneyfied” history of the man as avuncular satirist?
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Over at his blog for the Office of Research Communications at Ohio State University, Earle Holland provides more back stage insight on the media strategy surrounding the fossil Darwinius: Prior […]
Over at the “ideas site” World Changing, David Zaks offers up an interview with the NY Times’ Andrew Revkin. As I’ve written on this blog before, Revkin is one of […]
Christian nationalists, who believe God has chosen the U.S. as the promised land, succumb to “fear, misery, confusion and self-reproach,” says one writer who investigated the Call 2 Fall movement.
As I wrote yesterday, one of the emotional strategies employed in Expelled is to paint atheist pundits as the stand-ins for “big science,” in the process selectively avoiding interviews with […]
n n The Mighty Barrister alerted me to a post on the blog of the Book Design Review by Joseph Sullivan of Chicago, listing his favourite book covers of 2007. […]
One of my roommates way back when I was an undergraduate was an Emory Scholar. I can’t remember exactly how many of them were in each class—either twelve or fourteen. […]
Science fiction writer Catherine Asaro is also a ballet dancer and a math teacher who believes thatphysics and dancing are much more closely related than you might think
What happens when an artist loses his or her creative currency – the capacity for self-expression? That’s exactly what happened to legendary Los Angeles graffiti artist Tony Quan, a.k.a. Tempt […]
“If everyone writes, there’ll be more bad novels. And if writing is thought sacred, they will become more boring.” The Telegraph doesn’t think the novel is dead, just boring.
nn nn Rarely is the question asked: What if Italy had won the Second World War? The more frequently asked question is: What if Germany had won the war? Italy […]
“I prefer fiction because in fiction I do whatever I want,” says Chilean-American author Isabel Allende, who has published 18 books of fiction, non-fiction and memoirs over the past three […]
In a cover story at this week’s NY Times magazine, Gary Taubes digs deep into the world of epidemiological research on diet and health. It’s an important topic to call […]
“In all Nabokov’s work, the kindliness of memory recreates Eden, just as perversity razes it to the ground,” writes Lesley Chamberlain. “We can lose our capacity to interpret the world as good. We can see only darkness.”
The writer had a feeling of “immense relief that this quixotic enterprise of buying the magazine would not end up as my terrible fate.”
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There’s no such thing as a verbatim, facsimile memory, says USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. When we reconstruct events in our minds, we are pulling together set sequences of specific details stored in different parts of the brain.
In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Random House CEO Markus Dohle explained his company’s outlook on the future, why he’s in no rush to bargain with Apple, and what […]
Soccer’s peculiar resemblances to socialism is why America has yet to really succeed at the sport, says The Guardian’s American-in-Residence, Michael Tomansky.
George Packer’s review of Peter Beinart’s book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, is itself an elegant analysis of American history. Packer highlights some of choices our leaders […]
Many don’t believe they exist – but this is where gnomes may be found hiding
A Pacific counterpart to Atlantis, Mu is supposed to have been a large continent in the middle of the ocean and the home of an advanced civilisation, having sunk beneath the […]
“The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn’t is that you push through the parts where you know that you’ve just written seven pages when […]
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In more than 20 articles over the past year, a team of New York Times reporters and editors have detailed many of the intersections between energy policy and the environment. […]
While I was out of town last week I got a lot of reading done. One of the books I picked up was the paperback version of Palace Council by […]
The New York Times cover story on John Updike’s archives reveals a writer who took care to develop and preserve his literary legacy. While an instinct for careful self-preservation is […]
As advice columnists go, Emiy Yoffe of “Dear Prudence” is usually relatively compassionate. Today, however, Prudie was shockingly cruel to a young woman* grieving the loss of her best friend: […]
Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard previews some of the major themes and proposed initiatives from a new co-authored paper I have appearing at the American Journal of […]
The NY Times’ Andrew Revkin details a study at Nature that finds that in the Caribbean there have been centuries where strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were […]
How much impact has Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth had on the global warming debate? More generally, how can we understand the range of influences that a documentary film might have […]
The island inspired a Soviet SF novel and movie