Great Reads - PAGE 2

Last Update: Aug. 1, 2002

Latest (Random Selections)

Bruce Rising: An intimate look at how Springsteen turned 9/11 into a message of hope.
Report From a City of Ruins: On his new album, 'The Rising', rock populist Bruce Springsteen offers up songs of death and transcendence, love and loss, that are at worst elliptical, at best universal.
Americans Are Losing Money and Faith: Sliding stock prices and economic worries are making Americans less sure about their futures and about the Bush Administration
The Return of Greed: 'Wall Street’ director Oliver Stone sounds off on the current financial scandals, President Bush and the ongoing war on terror.
Tommy Guns: 'Road to Perdition' is a grandiose, dour Charles Bronson flick; 'Me Without You' is both impish and wise; 'Tosca' is a mess, but one with erotic chemistry. A Hell for Fathers and Sons
No More Moby!: Why on earth is this sample-splicer so popular?
Just-High-Enough Art: Having run a theater for the last decade, Sam Mendes, who is only 36, thinks like a studio head even when he's directing. Which means that he tries to win for both teams: commerce and art.
Pius the Hero: Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Pius XII was the object of adulation by Jews and Gentiles alike because of the Catholic Church’s role in saving more than 700,000 Jewish lives. Then why is he once more accused of being lenient towards Hitler?
America's Most Famous Bohemian Neighborhood: For more than a century, Greenwich Village gave refuge to the nation's misfits, enfolding them in a community that embraced individual eccentricity.
The Art of Creating a Legend: Umberto Eco explores the difference between 'literature' and 'light fiction'.
All Quiet at the Cathouse: Way out in the desert, time passes slowly between customers.
Interview with Gary Becker: Economist Gary Becker is fittingly broad, ranging from his views on moral hazard in banking, to the intriguing genesis of his work on the economics of crime.
Land of the Twee: Thomas Kinkade is America's biggest-selling living artist. And now he wants the fans to buy his houses.
The End of Thought: Cleverness is the key intellectual virtue of analytic philosophy. Competition in cleverness turns many a philosophical dispute into "bloodsport".
The Eagle Has Crash Landed: Pax Americana is over. Will the United States learn to fade quietly, or will U.S. conservatives resist and thereby transform a gradual decline into a rapid and dangerous fall?
The Undeniable Truth about Burma: Mission of Burma recorded 21 songs, helped invent post-punk, and left a legacy that resonated from R.E.M. to Moby. More than 20 years later, no one will let the band die.
Frank Sinatra's Finger-poppin' Classic: Beyond the magnificent late-night gloom (and the bombast of 'My Way') you'll find 'Songs for Swingin' Lovers' a joyous exploration of rhythmic invention.
The Last Defender of the American Republic?: Gore Vidal, the last standing small-r republican argues that America should stop meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private affairs of its own citizens.
The Long Ride: How did Lance Armstrong manage the greatest comeback in sports history?
The Head of the Pack: Michael Specter discusses Armstrong and the sport of cycling.
Left Hook, Right Hook: the Rules of Engagement: Just before World War II, Sidney Hook began to expound an increasingly hardened anti-Communist liberalism, and by the time of the cold war, he was famous for his unending stream of writings against Communism.
Russian Bear of a Man: Peter the Great was a larger-than-life figure. At 6ft 7in tall, he lived up to his name. In Russia he has always been a man enshrined in myth -- the 'giant genius' who dragged his country into the modern world.
Nostalgia Boom: Globalization promotes a yearning for local roots and identities. Our immersion in the digital and virtual world creates a demand for tactile and tangible skills at home...
Snobbery is a Complex Business: It thrives where society is most open, and America is a fine breeding ground for snobbery.
Is There a Gay Basis to Nietzsche's Ideas?: beneath his posturing and prophecy, Nietzsche was, to use one of his own phrases, 'human, all too human.'
Could You Sing That Again?: Craig Raine wonders why audiences have to guess the words of so many operas.
Summer of Love: The romance a teenage camper couldn't have today.
The Original Pick-Up Artist: At 57, James Toback is clean, sober and married. But the legendary Hollywood womanizer and gambler still bets his life on every new movie (and talks to strangers in Central Park).
Lord Buckley Rides Again!: The new biography of the Hip Messiah gives us a quintessentially American character worthy of a Mark Twain novel.
In Search of Her Father's Girlhood: Noelle Howey, author of 'Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods -- My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine,' discusses sexuality, angora and life with a transgender parent.
The New Gilded Age and Its Discontents: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about the corporate looting spree and Bush's woeful mismanagement of the economy.
Endangered Species: Why are there no more rugged, self-reliant he-men like the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert's 'The Last American Man'? Because no woman will put up with them.
Re-Imagining Singapore: After decades of heady growth, last year's economic contraction came as a shock to the city state. It not only laid bare the risks of an over-reliance on electronic exports but underscored the limits to a state-directed model of growth.
Thinking the Unthinkable: Economic integration between Malaysia and Singapore may seem far-fetched today but could one day become a mutually beneficial reality.
Murder and Mystery: It's a gangland story with something for everyone-midnight slayings, crooked cops, a vengeful lesbian. But Vietnam's crime crackdown may hold more than meets the eye.
Musical and Marital Discord: Leos Janacek is in one way a very easy composer to "place" -- but in all other ways, extraordinarily difficult.
Are Girls Really as Mean as Books Say They Are?: If you have been under your bed since 9/11, you will have missed the current flurry of books and media stories about just how much like people women are.
Suffering for His Art: In the summer of 2000, Sebastian Horsley from London became the first Western artist to be crucified in the Philippines.
The Use and Abuse of Star Wars: In late May and early June 2002, weird things involving dejected children and the new Star Wars film happened on opposite sides of the planet.
Star Wars: Tears of a Clone: The Star Wars films continue the 1930s tradition of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers: space opera adventure serials, unashamedly intended for mass consumption. 'Attack of the Clones' is really three films clumsily stuck together.
Slacker Zen: To the average Westerner, Buddhism is just another lifestyle that can be adopted and dropped from one day to the next. That is one reason why the Tibetan cause never really took off.
Bollywood Blues: Very few white or black Britons watch Bollywood movies, so how can the success of Bollywood in the UK be a triumph of integration?
Pop Goes the Queen: The preferred form of national self-representation, pop music, is noted for being ephemeral; and everything it touches becomes weightless, including the monarchy.
Vow-To Books: Liberals and conservatives agree that the institution of marriage needs help. But neither side knows what to do about it.
Which Wolfgang is Which?: Everyone from Hitler to Nasa has used him. As the Barbican mounts a festival of his music, Peter Conrad wonders what Mozart means now.
What Else Is News?: Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. This scrutiny produces an endless stream of books, academic studies etc...
Toscanini Lives: Arturo Toscanini was the most admired of 20th century conductors and, in certain circles, the most reviled.
Put Alternative Medicine Back in Its Box: The failings of contemporary medical practice are best confronted from the rational basis of scientific medicine, not by a retreat into the mystical traditions of alternative health.
There Could Be Billions of Earths Out There: Scientists say they are now in a position to try to estimate how many planets may exist in the galaxy and speculate on just how many could be like the Earth. The answer in both cases is billions.
Not Fade Away: Like no other performer of his generation, Pete Townshend stands for all the messy contradictions of youth, and for the necessity of figuring it all out as you go along.
Toe-Breaker or Epoch-Maker?: Stephen Jay Gould is very unusual as a scientific writer in enjoying telling us about himself as much as or even more than discussing the science.
The Point about Sleep: It is not waking time wasted but a positive activity essential to our physical, psychic and emotional well-being, and we are worse at everything if we lack it.
Steinbeck's Myth of the Okies: The enduring appeal of John Steinbeck’s 'The Grapes of Wrath' is its application of a great Biblical theme to the experience of an ordinary American farming family.
When Every Man Must Be an Artist in Bed: Lessons in female pleasure from Kim Cattrall and Mark Levinson's new sex manual, 'Satisfaction'.
On the Trail of Genius: A study of newly released FBI files shows the Bureau's persistence in trying to prove Albert Einstein a spook.
My Funny Valentine: Who was Richard Rodgers? He was as famous and successful as any American can be, but without ever swimming into focus in the way his contemporaries did.
The Gang That Couldn't Loot Straight: The fall of the '90s bubble's icons shows just why Americans would be crazy to trust their retirement money to the stock market.
John Entwistle, 1944-2002: The Who's bassist (and French horn player and all-around wry humorist) was always that histrionic band's least visible member. But his sly musicianship and blithe spirit gave the Who its soul.
The Death of Rolling Stone: The magazine that invented rock journalism lost its reason to exist years ago. Now, with a British lad-mag editor taking the helm, it's time to pull the plug.
Music is the Food of Brain Cells: Musicians have larger and more sensitive brains than their non-musical audiences, researchers have found.
Before Baghdad Burns: The author of a new book on Iraq cautions that a U.S. invasion to get rid of Saddam Hussein could be even more dangerous than his weapons of mass destruction.
Six Days That Shook the World: An Israeli historian talks about the weeklong war that shaped the modern Middle East and still fuels the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Case of the Girl Detective: With the passing of Nancy Drew's first author, the mystery of the teenage sleuth's true identity only deepens.
The Insanity and Unfettered Joy of Being Young: The story of the 'Godfather of Grunge is a tale of sickness, health, overweening ego, spectacular talent and reckless abandon.
Who's Bad?: Amid a messy $200 million dispute with Sony, Michael Jackson adopts temporary blackness and summons Al Sharpton to his cause.
The Strange Triumph of Electronic Music: It may not be on the radio, but it's the most influential -- and unifying -- force in pop music today.
The Ghost of Pop: Sam Phillips on Christian music and classic porn, working with T-Bone and her quietly successful comeback release.
Marvel's Forgotten Heroes: Spidey's the celeb of the year. Blade and the X-Men are huge, with Daredevil, Iron Man and the Hulk waiting in the wings. When will Hollywood show some love for Marvel's venerable Fantastic Four?
Double Down: Tom Waits released two proper records in a decade. Then he dropped two crusted with rust and riotous cacophony in one day.
More Songs About Buildings and Food: It's 1978, and a band of Manhattan art-school geeks called Talking Heads teams with Brian Eno to produce the funkiest nervous-breakdown record ever made.
The Single Best Movie About Rock 'n' Roll: A new DVD of 'The Last Waltz' remembers when Martin Scorsese captured a beautiful moment before the Band ceased to matter.
Pac Phenom: With its canary-yellow Everyblob hero, its masterfully simple design and its abstract realm where even death was a cheerful event, Pac-Man brought video gaming out of the bars and into the malls.
In The Heart of the Great Sonoran: The Mexican desert is fascinating, with some of the greatest natural history, geology, human history and kinship in the world.
The Philosophy of Monkey River Town: 'Small places have a way of having large voices. Singapore, for its rules, Gibraltar, for being British, Israel, for its violence, and Tonga, for its overeating. But Belize has little voice in the world. Belize is not much bigger than Israel, but Belize is no barking rat-dog.'
The Dynastization of America: Will political and economic inheritance displace democracy in the U.S.?
The Lenny Bruce FBI File: No amount of overzealous Free Speech rhetoric can silence two important facts about Lenny Bruce: One, that he was truly funny, even by today's standards; and two, he really did change the face of comedy.
What a Drag It Is Gettin' Old: Mick Jagger, knighthood, and the death of rock 'n' roll.
Is Rock Criticism Dead?: Now more than ever we need criticism that is idiosyncratic and passionate.
At Sea: Over the course of more than a century and a half, Herman Melville has himself become the White Whale of American literature.
The Make-Up Department: Can talented actors really illuminate Shakespeare's texts?
A Theatrical Titan: Czech-born but English-made, Tom Stoppard has dazzled for 35 years with clever plays.
Nights with the Honey Monster: If Samuel Johnson were alive today, he would no doubt be at work on 'Sex Lives of the Poets'. Ever since an infamous US conference paper a few years back entitled 'Putting the Anus Back into Coriolanus', there has been a fashion for literary biographies that tell us more about a writer's sperm count than his syntax.
Three Poems by Philip Larkin
The Year of Breathing Dangerously: Andrew Miller found himself starved of oxygen in melancholy Dublin.
God is in the Details: Ranjit Bolt admires the exquisite precision of Amit Chaudhuri's short stories, collected together in 'Real Time'.
An Account of Staggering Sexual Promiscuity: Adam Begley finds out how Catherine Millet has managed to make orgies boring in 'The Sexual Life of Catherine M'. The Joylessness of Sex
Scientist or Storyteller?: To some Sigmund Freud was a visionary anatomist of human nature, to others a talented writer who wove absurd theories into compelling narratives.
The Sunshine State: John Sayles' politically correct dogma crushes all the little people in his decaying Florida beach town.
The Emperor's New Clothes: This small movie about a Napoleon impostor may be a trifle, but it's an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.
Meet Steven Spielberg, Hardboiled Cynic: Tom Cruise battles an Ashcroftian security state in the director's dazzling sci-fi noir.
Welcome to the World: In defeat, the U.S. soccer team won an epic victory: It brought America into the world of sports.
The Future Lasts a Long Time: When the French philosopher Louis Althusser murdered his wife, his theories were fatally wounded as well. Playwright Steve Waters explains why he has made a drama out of this crisis.
Time for People Power: Palestinians have seldom faced a worse, or a more seminal, moment, writes Edward Said. How, then, might it be grasped?
Fardels By Any Other Name: Would the Bard be better in modern English? 'Od's pittikins, no.
That Uncertain Feeling: David Lodge on the prophetic self-portrait Kingsley Amis created in his least likeable novel, 'One Fat Englishman'.
Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich's early verse was praised by Auden but she stopped writing when she married. After devastating personal tragedy she found her voice again.
Censorship Threat for China's 'Lady Chatterley': Daughter of woman who inspired erotic novel sues to defend mother's reputation.
Therefore, I Am: Richard Watson's new biography of René Descartes, inventor of analytic geometry and the man who 'laid the foundation for the dominance of reason in science and human affairs', is idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, highly personal, wildly opinionated, and generously informative.
Why Did Nazis Drop the A-bomb?: Leading scholars John Lukacs and David Cassidy analyze the fall-out from recently released letters and their relevance to an acrimonious debate over the Copenhagen question: did high-minded Nazi scientists sabotage work on a German nuclear weapon?
The Birds of Hollywood: An Unnatural History: Movie producers spend countless millions to make the details convincing. So why can't they figure out that blue jays are asleep at night and thrushes go south for the winter?
File Sharing: Innocent Until Proven Guilty: An economist says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn't -- and he doesn't know why.
The Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Pothead: A marijuana connoisseur travels around the world seeking out the people who grow, smoke and worship weed -- and the people who try to stop them.
All about a Womb-to-Tomb Friendship: Jodie Foster makes a mean ol' nun in 'The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys', but the rest of this coming-of-age tale suffers from simply trying too hard.
An Idiotic Fun-House Ride: No serious film fan could stomach the cheap gags and farting contests in the goofball tribute 'Scooby-Doo'. But that's not to say it isn't a laughfest.
A Thriller With Brains and Feeling: In 'The Bourne Identity', Matt Damon and Franka Potente illuminate a gripping, handsome post-Cold War thriller from 'Swingers' director Doug Liman.
In Old-Hollywood Mode: With 'Windtalkers', his ultraviolent paean to the Navajo 'code talkers' who fought with the Marines in World War II, John Woo takes his Hollywood dream to new heights.
Who Wants to Marry a Regular Person?: In Michael Apted's sad, hopeful and deeply moving new documentary series on marriage in America, 'I do' isn't a happy ending -- but rather an uncertain beginning.
A '50s Affair: Fidel and Naty: A socialite's love letters helped sustain Castro's revolution. Enchanted Island: Cuba and its revolution, as seen through the unhappy fortunes of Castro's former mistress and her family. A Tale of False Promises; Castro's Road, a Historical Pageant; Synopsis of Showtime's 'Fidel'
Genesis vs. Geology: The claim that creationism is a science rests above all on the plausibility of the biblical flood, writes Stephen Jay Gould in this 1982 essay. A Scientist of the People: The radical politics of the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Moby Dick's Secret Weapon: Moby Dick had a secret weapon that helped him sink Captain Ahab's ship in Herman Melville's classic tale, according to research.
The Shamans of Scientism: The occasion of Stephen W. Hawking's 60th trip around the sun seems like a good time to examine a social phenomenon that reveals something deep about human nature.
The End of Mike Tyson: He'll go on fighting, but after his recent loss to Lennox Lewis, the public knows how washed up he is. Is Mike Tyson Gay?
The Invisibility of Asian-American Scholars: There are no Asian-American public intellectuals. The absence of such scholars from public-policy discussions may be the result of external as well as internal causes, but it is detrimental to more than Asian-Americans alone.
Fast Forward: Canoga Park is a rarely visited graveyard where celebrity pool cleaners go to die. On the surface, you'd never know that this seemingly working-class neighborhood was actually the self-appointed capital of porn.
Revulsion at the Boston Phoenix: Is a three-month-old snuff film news?
Freedom to Choose: Why the Boston Phoenix linked to the video released by Daniel Pearl’s murderers.
Hunting the American Dream: Ted Nugent discusses his new book 'Kill It and Grill It' in which our God-given gifts are respected and the screaming, testosterone-infested bull elk becomes supper.
Holding Out For a Hero: Ben Affleck? Matt Damon? Johnny Depp? Those guys aren't action stars -- they're pussies! Next up: Moby does Dirty Harry and James Bond goes gay.
In Search of the Phantom Tanager: Stalking an elusive songbird last seen in 1938, a naturalist confronts the myths and monsters of the Brazilian wilds, and succumbs to the thrill of a tantalizingly futile chase.
Attack of the Moans: 10 very good reasons why you should skip the latest 'Star Wars' saga.
Memory Lane Diane Lane's steamy portrayal of a mature, sympathetic adultress in 'Unfaithful' will finally give her the one thing she's been avoiding all her professional life -- a Hollywood ending.
Dropping the Ball: Racism, death, depression -- Halle Berry bawls her way to an Oscar in her grim new film but leaves critic Joe Queenan unmoved.
Angst in His Pants: Spider-Man is the latest big-screen superhero to get his tights in a torment about girls and feelings. Doesn't he know existential crises are for wimps?
What Really Happened at No Gun Ri?: An Army major says the Associated Press' Pulitzer-winning story of American soldiers massacring Korean civilians is grossly exaggerated and dishonest.
Nissan vs. Nissan: Is a North Carolina businessman a cybersquatter unfairly pirating the car maker's brand name, or something even worse: A spammer of journalists?
Welcome to the Occupation: Maple Razsa, an organizer from last year's living wage sit-in at Harvard, talks about his documentary on the event, snooping administrators and Oprah's take on poverty.
Fight the Power: Public Enemy's explosive 1989 hit single brought hip hop to the mainstream -- and brought revolutionary anger back to pop.
Forster's Final Novel: Various reasons are given to explain why, at just 45 years of age, and with another 45 to go, E.M. Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing.
Can Moby Save Pop?: Anointed by the desperate music media as pop's new king, Moby brings electronica to the masses with '18'. (Now if only he would stop trying to sing.)
Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy
An Evolving Dispute: In 'Survival of the Fittest', Kim Sterelny pits Gould against Dawkins.
Tyranny of the Majority: Ideology, big business and pressure-groups now govern politics, says Roger Scruton; and minorities barely get a look in.
Lessons From Madness: History has many lessons, even a history of madness. Will we ever learn from them?
The Elephant in the Sacristy: Beneath the scandals now consuming the Catholic church is a cluster of facts too enormous to ignore.
Read All About It: Despite a regionwide advertising slump and overcrowded markets, some Asian newspapers are finding new ways to reach advertisers and readers.
It's Sex but Not As We Know It: Oxford's scholarly and elegantly illustrated new edition of 'Kamasutra' may go some way in rescuing the ancient Indian text from lewd caricature.
Here Come the Buns: Butt cleavage is not just for the plumber anymore.
Calculated Risks: Harvard professor says smokers know exactly what they're doing.
T.E.'s Secret: New 'Lawrence of Arabia' files spark speculation.
When 300 Baud was the Bomb: Once upon a time there was no Internet. And it was good.
Wasteland: Comrade Mugabe is clinging to power, and taking his country down with him.
Saying Boo to Picasso: A majority of art critics have declared Picasso the winner in the Tate Modern match against Matisse but is their judgment flawed?
Imagining Reality: Should cinema tell the truth?
Farewell Mildred: Mildred Wirt Benson, the author who created Nancy Drew, girl sleuth, and inspired generations of young women with the teen-age heroine's spunk, independence and resourcefulness, has died at 96.
The Americanization of Irving Berlin: Honest craft and valid emotion have a way of outlasting fashion. In the last several years, cabaret singers have revived the Berlin masterworks.
The Double Life of a Sex Addict: By day she was a sought-after curator and well-respected member of the French intelligentsia; by night she was an insatiable hedonist whose passion was indiscriminate sex with anonymous men. And now she's written a shockingly candid and provocative memoir of her experiences. Excerpt from 'The Sexual Life of Catherine M.'
Dead Wives' Society: Which poet grieved most selflessly for the death of his wife? John Milton, Thomas Hardy, Douglas Dunn or Ted Hughes?
Grow Up, Anna Karenina!: We've lived more by the time we're 40 - something that became alarmingly apparent to Wendy Lesser when, in her mid-forties, she started rereading her favourite classics.
Losing Common Ground: Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less.
Revising the Book of Life: Only Stephen Jay Gould would dare to rewrite Darwin. But will America's best-known scientist leave much of an imprint?
What Ever Happened to Orwell's Missing Millions?: For Eric Blair to have died at 46, at the height of his powers, in relative poverty, just as he was about to become rich and famous, is an important part of the Orwellian legend.
Cops and Robbers: Elmore Leonard doesn't write whodunits -- we always know who done it because we see them doing it. You might say he writes howdunits.
Church Scandal: Priestly pedophilia is also set apart from other varieties by the fact that the seduction technique employs religion. Almost always some form of prayer has been used as foreplay.
Stuck in the Day Before Yesterday: Bill is looking more and more like the Clintons' past, Hillary their future.
Shocking History: To a degree that more than a few readers will find exceedingly difficult to stomach, Antony Beevor's 'The Fall of Berlin 1945' is about sexual violence.
The Divine Ms. M?: Once the supreme doyenne of domestic bliss, Martha Stewart now finds that all is not coming up roses.
Napster's Wake: The company that launched a thousand rips may be dead, but the movement it launched continues to thrive -- and to make a mockery of the music industry's pathetic online offerings.
Where's the Truth?: A fan's semi-fond farewell to 'The X-Files', which ended its eight-year run recently in a haze of melodrama and mystification.
Space Bore: The soul-deadening string of clichés that is 'Attack of the Clones' must immediately be shot beyond Pluto where it can do no harm.
The Man in Black: 'Ring of Fire', a new collection essays, magazine articles, book excerpts, and newspaper clips, pays respectful but somewhat spotty tribute to the great Johnny Cash.
David Riesman, 92, RIP: A tribute to the Harvard sociologist whose 1950 book 'The Lonely Crowd' helped Americans arrive at a new understanding of themselves.
The Lonely Crowd: The value and validity of David Reisman's scholarly work on inner-directed, other-directed and tradition-directed types.
Gay Professors on the March Across Europe
Is Classical Music Really Dying?
Fossils to Genes: Where did we come from and where will we go? A look at four books that explore the big questions of evolution.
The Merits of Meritocracy: Can self-fulfillment build character?
Would You Believe?: Callers to Art Bell's radio show get genial tolerance for their creepy tales.
The Man Whose Member Made Him Locally Famous
Busty Glam Babes:They're glamorous. They're gorgeous. They're alarmingly big-breasted. They're the Kano sisters -- two women who rule the celebrity circuit in Japan, with seemingly little else to commend them but their traffic-stopping looks. Are They for Real?
Island of Dreams: Duncan Campbell on the living legacy of Aldous Huxley's visionary ideas.
On Being Whiteballed: It was the Darwinian function of satire that Mark Goldblatt had in mind when he wrote a novel, 'Africa Speaks', which right now is probably not appearing in a bookstore near you.
Japan’s Gross National Cool: Japan is reinventing superpower -- again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has quietly grown.
Seductive Towers of Babylon: All of us want a bit of ‘America’, but few of us can have it, and even those who do still hunger for more, and more, says Ian Buruma.
Land of Freedom: How the flaunting of American affluence provokes the destitute and the desperate.
cowboys and Indians In many places and ways, Bombay echoed, and still echoes, America, observes Amit Chaudhuri.
The Anti-American: Arundhati Roy does not like to be called an "activist," but she has stuck her neck out for a variety of causes. Yet, at the same time, Roy has a tendency to sound preposterous.
The Man of Feeling: 'Lucky Jim', Kingsley Amis's comic masterpiece, may be the funniest book of the past half century.
When Here Sees There: In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy.
A Legacy of Swans Left to Science: He is thought of as rightwing but is Karl Popper just misunderstood? Roger James on the centenary of a controversial philosopher.
Fads and Figures: Scientific theories shouldn't be treated like last year's fashion, says Robert Matthews.
Fighting Spirits A steady stream of books has been chronicling the immediate horror of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but only now are commentators stepping forward to spell out the wider ramifications of the attacks and the ensuing war on terrorism.
Profile -- Francis Fukuyama: He is the intellectual as celeb, ready to pronounce on all the questions of the day including, soon, our "posthuman future".
Why Conductors Have Great Sex
Land of Hype and Glory: For a YBN (Young British Novelist), B. Hari Kunzru is surprisingly old school -- he's a straightforward storyteller in the mold of Kipling and Dickens.
You Never Get Over Yankee Doodle Fever: John Travolta on 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'" a glossy Warner Brothers bio-pic about the legendary George M. Cohan, a movie that's been dear to him since he was a little boy in New Jersey dreaming about a life on the stage.
From Truffaut's Centimes, a Wealth of Inspiration:Wes Anderson before watching François Truffaut's 'Small Change'.
An Unputdownable Read: James Lasdun's dark psychological thriller 'The Horned Man' is a masterpiece of chilling, mesmerizing control.
Inducing Hilarity by Doses of Shock: Brian Grazer on the mirthful attractions of 'Blazing Saddles'.
Making the Wit Seem Unwitting: Barry Sonnenfeld dissects Stanley Kubrick's nuclear satire, 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'.
The Unthinkable: How dangerous is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This Profile, from 1997, explores his history, his politics, and his ambitions.
Telling Complex Stories Simply: Barry Levinson explains the profound effect Elia Kazan's 'On the Waterfront' had on him as a boy.
A Perfectionist's Pupil With a Major in Creepy: Nicole Kidman talks about the artistry in 'The Shining'.
Inside the Xbox: Sales have been disappointing, and the co-creator of Microsoft's game console just quit his job -- a day before a book portraying him as a hero hit the bookstores.
The Beauty Contest: Excerpt from Dean Takahashi's new book, 'Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution'.
Karen Hughes: Exit the High Prophet: The person everyone thought would be the last to leave the this White House became the first. Bush will never be the same.
Colin Powell’s Humiliation Bush should clearly support his secretary of State -- otherwise he should get a new one.
Don’t Dumb Them Down: A new study by an expert on Web design shows what’s wrong -- and even dangerous -- about kids’ sites.
The Empire Bounces Back‘The Phantom Menace’ was a smash -- and a mediocre buzz kill. For ‘Attack of the Clones,’ a wiser George Lucas has been wooing back fans and building a better blockbuster
Dark Star: An inside look at the new 'Star Wars' episode: how the young Darth Vader fell in love and George Lucas rediscovered the heart and soul of his epic series.
Dam Hypocrite: Amrit Dhillon on the colossal self-importance of Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winner and ‘green martyr’.
Kedgeree, Shaken Not Stirred: What turned Ian Fleming from a useless stockbroker to an avid spymaster? William Boyd on the man behind James Bond.
The Taboos of Touch: A new book from University of Minnesota Press has just hit the stores. But weeks before it was available to the public, 'Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex', had already provoked a rash of national press.
Talk Tool: Gossip is not a trivial pastime: it is essential to human social, psychological and even physical well-being. The mobile phone, by facilitating therapeutic gossip in an alienating and fragmented modern world, has become a vital 'social lifeline'.
Vanity Fair and Vexation of Spirit: William Makepeace Thackeray's life-story has recently found two worthy tellers in the academic Catherine Peters and the novelist D. J. Taylor.
The Browning of America: Richard Rodriguez's new book confronts the Hispanic presence in the United States.
Henry James's Memories of Childhood: From an early age Henry and William James were destined for intellectual and literary greatness. But what was it in the brothers' education that fostered their imagination and genius so effectively?
Cornel West Gives Black Scholars a Bad Rap: Is it racist to hold black scholars to mainstream standards of evaluation? Prof. West's muse, W.E.B. Du Bois, is turning in his grave.
The Day the Music Died: Classical music, what most people still associate with public radio, hasn't much of a business side anymore. Looks like Beethoven is rolling over again.
Reading and Revelation: Nothing demonstrates how personal reading is more clearly than rereading does.
Walking the Line: An ardent defender of wilderness reflects on the solace of the mountains, and reconsiders his long-ago travels in Afghanistan, and a new world of human tragedy.
Bit: On September 11, in a remote corner of Myanmar, herpetologist Joseph Slowinski reached into a snake bag, as he had done a thousand times before. The next 28 hours would be his last. Mark W. Moffett recounts the death of a friend -- a man for whom beauty lay in a flash of danger hidden in wet grass.
Bull Market: How does a caffeine-loaded energy drink become a billion-dollar brand? RED BULL's creators inject their product with the adrenaline-by-association of extreme sports, and they never stop in the quest for buzz.
Mother Superior: Indira Gandhi led the most populous democracy of her time, but finally, ruthless and paranoid, she couldn't resist the temptation of tyranny.
Jerusalem Calling: A disillusioned young Israeli living in the U.S. warns the American left that it's too reluctant to criticize religious fundamentalists -- including George Bush.
The Art in the Popular: Characters in Homer weep uncontrollably, and they rage with even less restraint. Ancient Greek literature was much closer to the immoderation and emotional excess of modern popular culture than its champions today would like to think.
Supernatural Selection: When the neo-creos go public -- as they did recently in a hearing before the Ohio Board of Education, which they were petitioning for equal time in the classroom with Darwinism -- they do not stake any obviously foolish claims.
Gene Regime: Neither the WTO, nor individual governments, nor scientists, nor ethicists can effectively regulate human biotechnology on a global scale. So who will settle the troubling questions it raises?
Return of the Guy: Men were pronounced economically and evolutionarily finished in the late 1990s. But Charlotte Allen says that manhood is back in fashion.
Of Canvases and Coefficients: A new book uses statistical methods to analyze avant-garde art.
The Riddle of Turin: Primo Levi was an industrial chemist, a writer and an Auschwitz survivor, who on a Saturday morning, threw himself over the third floor banister into the stairwell and was instantly dead.
Galactic Gasbag: Beneath all the pseudo-mythic Joseph Campbell hogwash, the roots of George Lucas' empire lie not in 'The Odyssey' but in classic and pulp 20th century sci-fi.
Sign O' the Times: Part '80s musical retrospective, part angry social document and all booty-thumping housequake, Prince's 1987 classic stands as pop's last great double album.
The Information Challenge: Richard Dawkinsexplains the idea of information fed from ancestral generations into descendant gene pools, especially for the benefit of deluded creationists.
P.G. Rated: P.G. Wodehouse, the most British of writers, turns out to have been a Yank.
Beware the Cyclops: When Wole Soyinka visited a ravaged Palestine recently, he was struck by parallels with an ancient myth - one that sends out a dire warning to humanity.
Himalayan Realities: Nepalese writer Manjushree Thapa makes history with her first novel, 'The Tutor of History'.
Lords of the Ring: Trapped in poverty, many young Thai men seek escape in the challenging world of Muay Thai, or Thai boxing.
When Nation-building Destroys by Brendan O'Neill: Is the new Afghanistan a 'human rights triumph' - or 'not a pretty picture'?
The Strange Battle of Shah-i-Kot by Brendan O'Neill: Was Operation Anaconda an 'absolute success' - or a 'big mistake'?
Fearful Asymmetry: In his new book 'Right Hand, Left Hand', Chris McManus demolishes many items of left-hander lore, such as the old-wives' claims that left-handers are more creative than the rest of us, or die younger.
Torturing History: A military historian abuses the past.
The Moscosos and the Gauguins: Chapter One of 'Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life' by Nancy Mowll Mathews.
The Nobody Memoir: Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from the American soil as in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it.
Cyberspace and Race: The color-blind Web: a techno-utopia, or a fantasy to assuage liberal guilt?
Policing Disorder: Can serious crime really be reduced by punishing petty offenders?
In the Service of the Sultan: An unsavory chapter of Islamic history is revealed in Ronal Segal's 'Islam's Black Slaves'.
High-Tech Futures: How 'hard sf' keeps the science in science fiction.
Artful Deception: If ghostwriters are indispensable, why are they so invisible?
Detecting the Steel Fist Beneath Her Pastel Chiffon: Her subjects prepare to bury the most beloved of royals: The Queen Mother could always look her people in the face.
Her Father's Keeper: Laura Blumenfeld, author of 'Revenge: A Story of Hope', talks about tracking down the Palestinian who shot her father.
High Crimes: Ashley Judd as a knocked-around military wife brightens what might be the most entertaining big movie this year. (Not like that's saying much.)
Crush: Happy! Sad! And more hoary old clichés about what women want to see.
Big Trouble: Go ahead, laugh at this feebleminded Tim Allen comedy. You'll hate yourself for it tomorrow.
Lucky Break: Hey, let's put on a show! And bust out of the joint while we're at it! 'Full Monty' jailhouse follow-up falls flat.
Nation and Narration: It's January 2002, one year after Bush's controversial inauguration, and the White House is a shambles. Having passed the tax bill that was the only rationale for his Presidency in the eyes of his financiers, George W. Bush is in deep doo-doo.
Leaping the Abyss: Stephen Hawking discusses black holes, unified field theory, and Marilyn Monroe with astrophysicist Gregory Benford.
Science Fiction: After spending half a billion taxpayer dollars, alternative medicine gurus still can't prove their methods work--how convenient.
The Progressive Restoration: A Franco-German exchange between novelist Günter Grass and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the success of neoliberalism in transforming political regression into the standard of social progress.
Billy Wilder (1906-2002): He had zero tolerance for fools, but he trusted his audience completely -- and we trusted him back.
Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder is now a modern American classic: he has long been a wisecracking hero to students of the art of self-loathing. Cameron Crowe proves that the Wilder Touch is a thing in the world now, that the elegant unpleasantness of his better movies has become vastly cool in the minds of yet another generation.
Too Sexy for Her Rocker: Betty Dodson is 72 and Eric Wilkinson is 25, and after three years together they are still hot and heavy -- and happy.
Where are the Mahirs of Yesteryear?: The Web thrill is gone, according to the New York Times, thanks to a critical shortage of flashes in the pan.
The Inner Savant: Are you capable of multiplying 147,631,789 by 23,674 in your head, instantly? Physicist Allan Snyder says you probably can, based on his new theory about the origin of the extraordinary skills of autistic savants.
Has God Got a Dog?: It's not easy getting to grips with the deity. Especially if you insist on being literal about it... Alexander Waugh, Bernhard Lang and Peter Stanford take on the big questions in three very different ways.
Understanding America: Yes, we all know America. The trouble is that many of the things we know are not true, or are only partly true, or are true only in a very particular sense.
A Family Affair: 'The Brother' is the first full-scale account of the "atom spies" Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to appear since archival materials released in the 1990s documented their part in a Soviet espionage ring that flourished in the United States during World War II.
The Performer: Theodore Rex concludes in 1909 with President Theodore Roosevelt leaving the White House and pretending he doesn't hate to give it up. People who stayed awake during high school history know better. Of course he hates to go. He is only fifty years old and his energy has always been volcanic. This is no candidate for a shawl and rocker, but a vigorous middle-aged man ripe for a bully midlife crisis.
Lara Dishonored: Anna Pasternak, great-niece of 'Dr Zhivago' author Boris Pasternak, takes issue with Andrew Davies sex-charged version of the well-loved novel.
Black America and the Oscars: A One-Night Stand?: From Internet message boards to barbershops, African-Americans are abuzz with debate over Halle, Denzel and Sidney's history-making moments. Is "Monster's Ball" a racist film or a breakthrough? Do blacks wield any real power in Hollywood? Was the Oscar "blackout" more than a whitewash?
Death to Smoochy: How does a freewheeling Robin Williams, plus Edward Norton in a purple rhino suit, equal a morbidly lame comedy?
The Rookie: A rough, weatherbeaten Dennis Quaid salvages a sentimental story about playing baseball and believing in dreams.
Clockstoppers: Impressive sci-fi effects and cute actors can't save a trite, safe teen flick that should please Joe Lieberman.
Son of the Bride: This crisp, witty Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee captures a beleaguered restaurateur's midlife crisis (and Argentina's).
Harry Shearer: The comic genius of 'This is Spinal Tap' fame talks about corporate corruption, the art of the American apology and his new film, 'Teddy Bears' Picnic'.
Panic Room: Dour director David Fincher's showy thriller wants to sell pulp as dark, edgy drama -- too bad he misses the dramatic meat.
Blade II: Alas, 1998's vampire disco has shut down, but this sequel offers plenty of gore, goo, creepy orifices and video-game-style action.
The Truth about Globalization: Globalization, taken as a whole, is a positive economic force well worth defending; its economic and social effects are exaggerated by both its detractors and supporters.
A Pilgrimage to Popper: 'Wittgenstein's Poker', by the British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, is a terrific book, a fuguelike account of everything we know and don't know about a ten-minute squabble between two great and ornery Austrian-Anglo-Jewish philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.
Backstabbers: In 'Woman's Inhumanity to Woman', pioneering feminist Phyllis Chesler dares to talk about the ways women -- including famous feminists -- stab each other in the back.
1491: New evidence of both the extent of the New World's population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.
Hollywood Redux: Reworking old films becomes a distraction from making new ones.
You're the Dr.: What's as Easy as ABC, Only a Little Farther Up the Alphabet? A PhD.
They Got It Wrong: In 'Alas Poor Darwin', Steven and Hilary Rose and other contributors accuse evolutionary psychologists of sins both scientific and political.
The Last Word on Heroism: Heroism is first and foremost the property of peace-makers. It takes infinitely greater courage to salvage a people or an epoch from conflict than to start or continue it.
Can Asians Think?: Singapore's ambassador to the U.N. talks about his controversial new book and the gulf between Western and Eastern minds.
Hi-Tech Health Check: Malaysia is turning to technology as a cure for a shortage of trained medical staff. A wireless hospital is the first step toward a health-care system that could be the envy of the world.
The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery: Contrary to conventional wisdom, slavery has not disappeared from the world. Social scientists are trying to explain its persistence.
The New Empire Loyalists: Former leftists turned US military cheerleaders are helping snuff out its traditions of dissent, says Tariq Ali
Salman Rushdie on Peaceniks and 'the Belligerati'
The Gould Rush: Stephen Jay Gould lets his emotions outweigh his strengths and achievements in 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory', a brontosaurus of a book whose very size is a testament to unrestrained ego.
Who Was the Real Artemisia? She modeled for her father, became one of the most successful Italian painters of the 17th century, and has sparked the imagination of contemporary novelists and filmmakers. Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art looks at both Gentileschis in a major show.
On Plagiarism Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense. So were Milton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann and Edouard Manet.
Mary Magdalene: Jesus Christ is a holy man, yes. But he is also incredibly beautiful in this chapter from "The Erotica Project."
Jesus Christ vs. Ted Turner: Are their uncanny similarities mere coincidence?
Thanks. A Lot: Let the critics say what they will about Elizabeth Wurtzel's books, her acknowledgments pages are sheer literary genius.
The Writer of Dreck: With his appalling new novel, Thomas Kinkade, 'The Painter of Light', makes a strong bid to become the world champion of vapid, money-grubbing kitsch.
Yankee Folly: Denis Halliday, the former head of the UN's humanitarian program in Iraq says an American invasion would be an international crime -- and would make the U.S. even less safe.
Of Hatred and Innocence: Filmmakers B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro discuss their Oscar-nominated "Promises," a wrenching and intimate portrait of the children of Jerusalem.
Jesus Rock: Andrew Lloyd Webber's much-mocked rock opera is actually a classic work of '70s spiritual exploration -- and besides, Our Lord is hot.
Love Boat: Errant women on a convict ship to Australia in the 1780s were sexual playthings, potential mothers and sometimes romantic partners -- if they didn't succumb to scurvy first.
Driving Miss Crazy: How a black chauffeur introduced Jane Fonda to God.
Short Changed: Why do tall people make more money?
Rebuff for Reebok: The running shoes company wanted to give a big cash prize to an Indonesian labor activist. But Dita Sari said no.
Bright Guys Don't Always Get the Girls: A brilliant biologist's embarrassing new memoir reveals that even with a Nobel prize under his belt, a 24-year-old geek finds it hard to get laid.
Girl Squad: In the mid-1970s, women raced bicycles. Today, girls do.
Revising the Book of Life: Only Stephen Jay Gould would dare to rewrite Darwin. But will America's best-known scientist and his new 1,464-page magnum opus, 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory', leave much of an imprint?
Elvis and the Books of Isaiah:What do Isaiah Berlin and Elvis Presley have in common? They both continued to issue hit singles long after their deaths.
Laugh More and Live Longer: People who laugh more cope better with the stress of daily life, they live longer and are healthier. Laughter also helps us to bond with people and communicate with one another and so research into humor is far from trivial.
Plotting a Family Trauma: Ian McEwan delivers more doses of disquiet in 'Atonement', a novel whose opening scene of pastoral bliss belies the terror within.
Bold Jazz Diva: Abbey Lincoln doesn't shrink from death or despair; her songs may begin with the personal, but they're imbued with a wisdom that makes them universal.
Stupid Spending: Why do we buy the things we shouldn't? One answer: Delay of gratification is a nice long-term goal, but instant gratification is disconcertingly tempting.
Zen & the Art of Success: An instructive story that charts the rise and fall of a womanizing, BMW-driving Buddhist abbot.
Lights! Camera! Cigarettes!: How tobacco companies, hoping that smoking scenes in Hollywood movies would increase sales, worked diligently through the 1980's and early 90's to get as much screen time for their brands as possible.
Communal Slaughter in India: "What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God," says Salman Rushdie commenting on India's worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in over a decade.
Augmented Reality: The prototype for the killer app in Portable Computing.
Time Travel: Weird Science or Workable Concept?
What is a Blog?: A useful primer on the latest and neatest Web trend.
Sullivan's Principles
A Blogger Manifesto
Is Someone After Doris Kearns Goodwin?
Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle
The "Borking" of Doris Kearns Goodwin
A Study that Fails to Pierce the Myth of the Slut
Geezers Will Always Tell You About the Golden Age That Was
Much Ado About the Bard... Again: Was actor and landowner William Shakespeare merely a front man for Christopher Marlowe or did he really write those damn fine plays?
One Goose-Step at a Time: A new portrait of Mussolini shows him as a man with a genius for ruthless pragmatism.
The Longest War
Arc of a Diva: After two decades of Eurostardom, Kylie Minogue's brand of glossy retro-disco may finally conquer America.
Andy's Hot: Warhol's art is fetching more money now than ever. But is his work being overvalued?
How Reporters Fall in Love: A Campaign-Trail Memoir
Who is God?
The Midlife Crisis As a Patriotic Duty
He Won a Nobel Prize But Why Does John Steinbeck Get No Respect?
Information Overflow
Theology and the Clash of Civilizations
In Praise of Vulgarity
The Lie That Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination
44th Annual Grammys: Stuck in a Moment
Monica, O Monica: America's "blow-job queen" spills all in new documentary.
Fidel, Monica and Me: A Russian journalist with a famous father expands on her infatuation with Castro.
Hitler's Clairvoyant: The man who foretold the Fuhrer's rise also happened to be a closet Jew.
The Man Who Bought the World
India's First Lit Fest: No readers, no books and a few petulant authors. That about sums up the country's pathetic attempt to put on a writers' ball.
Landing On His Feet
Fireworks at Neemrana
Fashion on Ice
Misguided Attempts to Behead the Hydra
Down Where Everything is Red
Going to Disturbing Lengths for a Good Book
National Post Dubious Achievement Awards
Waylon Jennings, R.I.P: The outlaw hero who brought attitude to country music will be missed.
Books of the Year (2001)
Cold Comfort Farms
Are We Hardwired for God?
The Many Faces of Margaret
Memoirs of a Rock 'n Roll Fixer
In Search of a Cure for Literary Islamophobia
Francophiles Fete 200 Years of Victor Hugo
Contested Space: Mohammad Ali Jinnah
The Call of Beauty, Coming In Loud & Clear
Naipaul Lets Rip at 'Banality' of Indian Women Writers
Hermann Hesse's 1946 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Hermann Hesse - Autobiography
Hesse's Steppenwolf
Learning To Laugh: The Steppenwolf's perception of the bourgeoisie and his escape from it.
American Literature's Eveready Bunny
The Poetry of Equation
The Mighty River of Classics: Tradition and Innovation in Modern Education by Camille Paglia
V. S. Naipaul is No Liberal and Herein Lies His Importance
Growing up Amidst Jazz Stars, Junkies and Other Freaks of Nature
A Lesbian Mother Speaks Up
Is Human Evolution Finally Over?
Chinese Transnational Feminism and the Cinema of Suffering
Oldest Living Surrealist Tells All
Asylum for the Gracefully Insane
The Meaning of Life... in the Laboratory
Tracing Footnotes
Bored of the Rings
Bill’s Biggest Bet Yet
Terror Hotspots: Malaysia, Somalia, Indonesia
What Went Wrong With Islam?
Dashiell Hammett, Mystery Man
Cinema: The Taming of the Crew
Philotyrants, Inc.
War is Worse Than a Crime - It's a Waste
In Cold Blood
Wake Up Dead Next Time and You Might Have a Book on Your Hands
Werewolves of Paris
The President and the Evildoers
A Regular Fascist of the Soul
On Human Dignity by Isaiah Berlin
The Bill Clinton of Journalism
Pierre Bourdieu, 71, French Thinker and Globalization Critic
The Great Narayan
'Occidentalism' by Avishai Margalit/Ian Buruma
Terrorist Raid Manual
The Afghan Tragedy
Goblin Market: 'Fellowship' is Nearly a Horror Movie
'The Caprices': Gothic Tales From the Pacific Theater
The Trouble with the CIA
Sympathy for the Devil
Real Life Rock Top 10
The N Word
The Prime-Time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian
Capitalist Pigs
Forget the Force - 'The Lord' Rules
Life in a Guantanamo Cell
Bowling Together
Why Bush's Bioethics Czar Recommended Nathaniel Hawthorne
Action Man
Susan Sontag: The Risk Taker
'Field of Battle' by William Trevor
Julian Barnes on the Vanished World of the London Literary Magazine
Jules Verne's Newly Discovered Paris Novel
A Love Affair With Color
Edward Condon and the Cold War Politics of Loyalty
"Happiness" is Not Enough
Why Boswell Was Far From Being a 'Model Biographer'
Setting Right a Dangerous World
New Gauls, Please
Is American Literature Too Soft on the Suburbs?
Myths About Genius
Black People aren’t Animals
Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld
Uneasy People Want Easy Answers in Short Books With Cute Titles
Are We Losing Our Homing Instincts?
The Unforeseen Disruption of Moving Ahead
Oliver Sacks' Riveting Memoir of 'Lost Love'
Telling the Story of Justice Rehnquist's Nomination
The US Comes Out of its Closet
Carey's Kelly: Truth and Dare
Sir Vidia: Prickliness. Purity. Singularity.
'Elle' Bent on Mauling Naipaul
Seepersad Naipaul: The Father's Comic Gift
The Lure of the Unfathomable
There is No Universe Other Than the One We are In
Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
Women of God
When God Went Global
Intelligent Design Theory and Neocreationism
The Last Gasp of the Master
Central Casting in Academe
'When Godzilla Gets the Willies' by P. J. O'Rourke
Edward Lear's Complete Verse
'Is Israel More Secure Now?' by Edward Said
Lost Worlds of Science Fiction
To Feel and Feel Not
Business as Usual in the Roman Empire on That First Christmas
The Double Life of Miklós Rózsa
The Mosque to Commerce
At Home in the Universe
So Many Good Books, So Little Time to Read
By Their Clothes Ye Shall Know Them
Art Mirrors Physics Mirrors Art
Celebrity Culture is Escapist Fun
The Triumph of English
Hurricane of the Century
The B-52: A Marvel of Patience and Persistence
Stephen Ambrose, Copycat
Author Admits He Lifted Lines From '95 Book
In Wartime, Government Considers Media a Menace
The Bush 100
Fourteen Top Bush Officials Owned Stock in Enron
Enron: Who's Accountable?
Steely Dan's Sophisticated Skank
Hey Nineteen
Two Against Nature: The Lost Liner Notes
A New Giant Sucking Sound
How 9/11 Affected Celebrity Culture
The Osama Tape As Heard by Al Jazeera
Wole Soyinka's Outrage
The Triumph of English
Naipaul Interviewed
V.S. Naipaul's Nobel Lecture
Student Bloopers in a Class by Themselves
Talk about Minimalism - Empty Room Wins Art Prize
Where No Geek Has Gone Before
Why Julia Roberts Must Take Leads in Movies
'Vanilla Sky': Cameron Crowe's Aggressively Plotted Puzzle Picture
'The Royal Tenenbaums': Wes Anderson's Self-Serving Suburban Angst Film
'Iris': The Film of the Life of Novelist Iris Murdoch Suffers from PBS Syndrome
'Kandahar': A stark and Beautiful Film Tracing an Afghan Woman's Journey
'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc' by Mark Twain
RLS: A Head Full of Swirling Dreams
'Nigger' is OK, After All
Michel Houellebecq is the Only Important French Novelist
Why Debt Relief is a Bad Deal for the World's Poor
'High Self-Esteem is Unattractive'
The Decline and Fall of Disneyland
Looking the World in the Eye
Excerpt from 'Conversations with Picasso' by Brassaï
How 'The Simpsons' Survives
'My Crush on Musharraf'
The Junking of the English Language
Emily Dickinson: The Solitary Visionary
Men Grow Old Disgracefully... So Why Not Women?
Shedding Writer's Block
Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes
'Shallow Hal': The Brothers Farrelly Take on Weighty Inner Beauty
Does bin Laden have Marfan Syndrome?
Some Thoughts on Clint Eastwood and Heidegger
The Pied Piper of the Psychedelic Era
Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s
Mullahs on the Mainframe
The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium'
Excerpt from 'A River Runs Through It' by Norman Maclean
The Phases of the Four Great Awakenings
Confessions of a Rainforest Biologist
7 Things You Didn't Know about Tibet
The Baby War
Two Cheers for Democracy
Reasons for Liking Tolkien
Harvard's Prize Catch, a Delphic Postcolonialist
The 'Pure Act' U.S. Prez
A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal and the Battle for an American Icon
A New Giant Sucking Sound
Wole Soyinka's Outrage
Baloney Detection, Part I
Baloney Detection, Part II
Fighting the Forces of Invisibility
Tense Present
The Devil's Playthings
Eloquent Witnesses to Apocalyptic Horror
Two Bad Papers on Language Usage
Hitler was Gay
The Troubling Story of Biological Weapons
Waiting for the Barbarians
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
Robert Mitchum: Inventor of Big-Screen Cool
The Crazy World of Stephen Hawking
'The Clash of Ignorance' by Edward Said
Edith Piaf: The Little Spar
Women With Rhyme, Reason and Rhythm
Mona Lisa: The Story Behind the Smile
Corset History
Do Humans Alone 'Feel Your Pain'?
The Crusaders' Giant Footprints
Genome for the People
The Desert of the Real
Guests in the President's House
Gone in a Flash
'Moby-Dick' Turns 150: Literary Leviathan Survives Critics, Harpooning Profs
An American Primer by Walt Whitman
America's Bard
Personal Recollections of Walt Whitman
America and the War
J.G. Ballard: A Crash Course in the Future
The Making of Afghanistan
Paging Winston Churchill
Bonfire of My Vanities
Benjamin Barber's 'Jihad vs. McWorld'
What Exactly Can Art Heal?
The Future of Science, and the Universe
Flaubert's Oriental Education
Flaubert's Significant Mother
The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
Classical Music’s Most Overrated Glamor-Puss
The Curious Case of Caryl Chessman
The Story of O
The Writing Life
Reconstructing Rockwell
V.S. Naipaul on His Contentious Views on Islam
Who Hijacked Islam?
Romania: Bottom of the Heap
How - and How Not - to Love Mankind
Towering Babel
Naipaul's Latest Parable of Dislocation
'Stop Living and Read'
Genome Envy
How the British Saw Their Empire
Lenin's Mistress
The 2,988 Words That Changed a Presidency: An Etymology
Serious Fiction Doesn't Have to Be Marginal or Boring
Director Antoine Fuqua Finds the Monster in Denzel Washington
The Contrasting Worlds of Dawn Powell's fiction
The Sound of Discord
A Return to Java
Pickup Artists: The Erotic Power of Paintings
Churchill: The Greatest One-Man Show on Earth
In Defense of C.S. Lewis
For Joan Didion, the Page is a Stage
Decline of the West?
Why War Against Terror is Counterproductive
Oliver Sacks' Chemical Connection
Excerpts from Naipaul's Work
'Our Universal Civilization' by V. S. Naipaul
'It is terrible, this plebeian culture that celebrates itself'
Naipaul's Achievement
Naipaul Derides Novels of Forster
Nobel Dream Comes True for V.S. Naipaul
Nightfall Vision That Has Grown Ever Darker
Edward Said: Secular Protestant
What Makes Martha Nussbaum Run?
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan
Edward Said, Imperialist
The Closing of the Islamic Mind
Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan
Saving Us from Darwin
Authorized by God
How Satanism Links into Recovered Memory and Child Abuse
Ted's Dark Lady
The Man who Discovered Britain
The Postmodern Politics of Image and Reputation
New York: A City Changed Forever? Maybe Not
To Be Precise, Tintin
'The Warden of English
The Pokémon Panic of 1997
Muhammad Speaks
Don DeLillo on Terror in Our Lives