Fred Kaplan shares his thoughts about what it is to be a biographer. “They record the arc of a life. But they try to give it form and shape, the way we all as individuals try to give form and shape to our lives.” Courtesy […]
British anthropologists have mined literature to find out how sad or happy we have been over the decades. Through word usage, the researchers were able to determine the emotional state of the culture over the past several decades. From the story in NPR: “Several years […]
Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget examined some of the issues that have arisen in individuals’ lives now that web culture has become so pervasive. It’s a wonderful book that looks at how our digital lives are designed affects society in ways both […]
The New York Times reviews Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism by John Burt in the upcoming Sunday Book Review. Of course, it being President’s Day weekend, not to mention the movie Lincoln being nominated for so many awards, our nation’s 16th president seems to be a popular […]
Megan McCardle asks, “Why is Barnes and Noble getting out of the bookstore business?” From her post at The Atlantic Wire: “But the sad fact is that Amazon is crushing the margins of physical retailers, including bookstores, in two ways. Fewer customers are coming to […]
If it’s not too late to pick my favorite reads from 2012, I offer Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. It’s a wonderful look at some of the big questions about how we came to be, who we are, and […]
So how close is Lincoln depicted by Daniel Day-Lewis in the current film to what historians believe was the historical personality? Pretty close, actually. The New York Review of Books has published an interesting story about the film. Here is writer David Bromwich on Lincoln’s […]
A wonderful tree for readers from design-dautore.com. Happy Holidays!
I greatly enjoyed Ross King’s recent books of art history, including The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. So I am looking forward to reading his […]
From More Intelligent Life: “[Geoff] Sawers’s Literary Map of the United States of America includes more than 200 novelists, poets and cartoonists, and the selection process, as in all literary contests, had an element of the arbitrary. First, Sawers and his co-artist, Bridget Hannigan, drew […]