“I freely admit: When I was in the media business, especially after the federal government changed the rules to favor large companies, I tried to sweep the board, and I came within one move of owning every link up and down the media chain,” says […]

Do teachers really love depressing books? It’s an interesting question. Writer Barbara Feinberg believes they do, and she says as much in her new tome “Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories and the Mystery of Making Things Up.” An article in a recent New York […]

How do we talk to one another in such a market driven democracy? How are ideas discussed in an atmosphere so polarized by the current presidential campaign? What is the nature of our public debate? These are questions on Cornel West’s mind as well. West […]

“Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of an intriguing new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangers”, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University […]

How preschool children experience picture books is affected by their mothers’ education level and by who is reading to them, says Jane Torr, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, in Australia. According to Torr’s article in the August issue […]

While on a vacation, have you ever thought “I wonder what the local bookstore is like?” Isn’t it true, that local independent bookstores tell so much about a town or a neighborhood? I often want to wander into those unique stores when I travel. Well […]

Bruce Springsteen wrote an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. I hope they don’t mind if I reprint it here: “A nation’s artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I’ve tried to think long and […]

Samuel Huntington has an essay about his book “Who Are We?” that has been posted on the American Enterprise Institute’s Web site. “America’s core culture has primarily been the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded our nation,” he writes. “The central elements […]