News:

In many of my classes at Illinois State University, I’ve been setting aside time to ask the following questions of my students: How many works by US Latino or Latina writers have you encountered in your classes so far? Who are...[more]

In early 2009 the Texas Board of Education met to vote on whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution must be taught in the classroom. On the surface, this seems reasonable: assessing the...[more]

“Besides reading, there was no place,” declares Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. For most of its history, Russia has been a place where books have seemed more real, carried more authority, than the “real” world. And, from Tsar...[more]

In the memorable words of those other ‘60s hangovers, the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” There have been few stranger trips than the intellectual odyssey undertaken by some of the Dead’s contemporaries, as...[more]

Gianni Vattimo’s book-length essay, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, first published in 2000 in Italian, is a kind of apologia for a philosophical life that has always been, to say the least, exposed to controversy....[more]

In literary theory the mimetic fallacy is an error authors make when they depict a condition too literally. An example is the portrayal of cruelty in a way that is repulsive in the eyes of the audience or a portrayal of boredom...[more]

The summer of 2010 was a tough one on planet Earth. It also should have discomfited climate change skeptics. This past summer, nine nations set all-time-high temperature records. Unprecedented monsoons and flooding left 20...[more]

On its August 9 cover, Time magazine published the image of Aisha, a young Afghan girl whose face had been horrendously mutilated by a Taliban commander on the grounds that she had disrespected her in-laws. Around the same time,...[more]

The new collection of Edward Snow’s translations of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great figures of twentieth-century European literature, ideally will accomplish two things. First, it will allow new readers to...[more]

In his provocative and readable little book Why I Am a Buddhist, Stephen Asma aims to introduce the uninitiated to Buddhism, to “remin[d] and inspi [e]” those who are already familiar with it, and to show how to apply basic...[more]

The arrival on the bookshelves of Alex S. Jones’s new book, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, seems serendipitous. Scant months after the book’s release, the Obama White House disavowed Fox News...[more]

If Jim Harrison is not a pornographer, he’s close. He has always written about appetites—usually for food, drink, sex, sleep, and nature—but the older he gets, the more the one appetite dominates his prose and the less hungry his...[more]

Labor Without Love Reviewed by Al Gini The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton Pantheon, 326 pages, $26 Alain de Botton is the most widely read English language philosopher in the world today, and if you take...[more]

Inherent Vice: A Novel, By Thomas Pynchon  Penguin, 384 pages, $27.95 Reviewed by Sean McCann Thomas Pynchon may be our last great Calvinist writer. Since the publication of his first novel V. in 1963, a dark...[more]

Mothers and Others: The Evolution of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Belknap Press of Harvard University, 422 pages, $29.95 A major theme that runs through all of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s books is the role of...[more]