Socrates Offside
/What place do deep questions about the meaning of life have in our technological age? Is philosophy more important than ever?
Read MoreA Picture Book
/Cover art from Omni, the new-age science mag of yore, is now a coffee table book: Giger, Frazetta, and Grant Wood are all here, but something crucial has been left out.
Read MoreTroubled Sheep
/William Deresiewicz has written-up some admonitions for gifted children of privilege: beware of status-mongering, ignorance of other classes, greed. But is his book itself just a wee bit ... privileged?
Read MoreTwenty Feet Tall!
/The third voume of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland trilogy is sure to fly off the shelves, but those flying copies will be light to the tune of a few needed footnotes, omissions our managing editor finds, to say the least, troubling.
Read MoreFelix Feels Bitter
/a poem
Read MoreSleeping In
/Sam Harris, one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement, has written a book about how to live a spiritual life without religion. But does this anti-preacher book come off a bit preachy? Maybe even, awkwardly enough, dogmatic?
Read MoreGiddy Discomfort
/How ought we to read the reactions of viewers to a piece of provocative art? What if that piece, like Kara Walker's "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" is entirely to do with race?
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “My world is a jungle of threats”
/A Colder War is the latest from Charles Cumming, one of the best at depicting the frail and brutal world of spydom. Neely Tucker’s The Ways of the Dead marks the debut of what promises to be a first-rate series.
Read MoreTo Brave the Swollen Waters
/Powerful South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin's second novel to be translated into English tells a touchingly human tale set in a world which, for most of her Western readers, could scarcely be more alien.
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