Culture & Religion

President Obama can reshape the debate over “the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage,” writes Henry Louis Gates Jr.

This week’s New Yorker contains extraordinary, and extremely moving, letters written by Saul Bellow to other novelists. Bellow was, for many critics and readers, primus inter pares in American twentieth […]

A taxpayer-funded bar in the German city of Kiel caters to a very particular clientele: unemployed alcoholics. The bar aims to keep its patrons from disturbing other citizens during drinking binges.

“The ‘birther’ myth is the political equivalent of a horror-movie villain: Not only does it refuse to die, but every time someone tries to kill it, it only comes back stronger,” writes Christopher Beam.

Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.

“No poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read” as Ezra Pound, writes Jamie James. After him, “anyone aspiring to be a poetic messiah would be shunned as a charlatan.”

“If it’s any good, [literature] can make you feel less alone in the world...It gives you some late-night company with your memories and your sorrow.Literature does touch people; it’s not […]

“A few snapshots.” According to novelist Tim O’Brien, that’s all our minds retain of our childhoods, adulthoods, and even the people we’ve loved most deeply. “And that’s memory? Little remnant […]

“Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that’ll be just a little sad,” writes Penn Jillette. “It’s always a little sad to lose some stupid.”

“Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age,” Maia Szalavitz.

Established by the British in 1920, the Baghdad Equestrian Club has been one of the most stable institutions in Iraq since the invasion.

Jackie Kennedy’s wit and style suits a British actress such as Rachel Weisz who will play the role in an upcoming film, writes The Independent.

Today, I’m blogging from the JUNO Awards in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The JUNOs are Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys. The JUNOs honor Canadian musicians and ensembles. I’m here with my […]

Generation Y’s selfish desire for instant gratification has created political apathy and kept them from even the simplest gesture of completing the census form.

Garrison Keillor writes that plain and simple virtues like honesty and modesty are considered naive in politics but are still crucial to a peaceful earthly existence.

Organizers of this summer’s World Cup in South Africa have not done enough to accommodate the local population and have been insensitive to local traditions.

Many an aspiring screenwriter has pored over Robert McKee’s book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting,” trying to suss out the creative secrets that will result in […]

“If film criticism really is dying, it’s doing so with all the dignity of a bunch of clucking old hens, squawking in despair while the fox gnaws his way through the wire,” writes Andrew O’Hehir.

Because of the sheer number of games that have been played over time, finding truly unique statistical milestones in baseball is becoming more and more difficult.

In a recent issue of British tabloid Grazia, the now celebrated (and still anonymous) “Oxbridge Sex Blogger” has a chance to explain her motives. She claims she’s simply attempting to […]

The other night I was watching ABC’s remake of “V” and wondering: What if the space-boot was on the other foot? What if we human beings were the “advanced” species, […]

If Christopher Hitchens were to spend “a long and arduous evening in the alehouses and outer purlieus” of 19th Century London, he’d want to be doing it in the company of Charles Dickens.

Faced with plummeting endowments and overextended commitments, public universities are moving toward privatization, writes Edward J. K. Gitre, who worries about the long-term consequences.

Saffa Khan is on four college wait lists, and writes that these lists “prolong the holding pattern of teenage life.” Instead, colleges should simply reject those without a reasonable chance of getting in.

Citing numerous clues, experts believe that a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was long attributed to the circle of Francesco Granacci is really by Michelangelo.

Elif Batuman unearths seven unproduced screenplays written by famous intellectuals, including Nabokov’s story of a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, and Sartre’s failed Freud epic.

There may be plenty of fish in the sea, but we humans tend to get overwhelmed by too many possibilities—whether in choosing potential mates or choosing between brands of jam […]

Massimo Vignelli was once traveling by train with the great Le Corbusier and his circle. It was the dead of summer, and as a young architecture and design “groupie” Vignelli […]

The recent case of a Tennessee woman who sent her 7-year-old adopted Russian child back to Moscow is becoming a test for the international adoption vetting process, writes Daniel Wood.

“If the Rubik’s Cube is like life … then a good life is like a good puzzle,” writes Stefany Anne Golberg. “It can be solved within the order of solitude but is more rewarding in the chaotic company of others.”