Biographer Jeffrey Meyers on how one of history’s great idlers became one of literature’s greatest wits.
Comments [8]In an archive edition, we talk with Nora Ephron about hot flashes, new wrinkles, and her collection of essays on confronting age.
Comments [10]We hear the story of one writer’s magnificent obsession with the great American ballad, House of the Rising Sun.
Comments [12]Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
Comments [7]A new look at frontier medicine, and the wildest tonics of the old Wild West.
Comments [11]From the “Huck Finn” to “The Feminine Mystique,” author and critic Jay Parini talks about the books that really changed America.
Comments [34]We go on the road to hot and sour China and beyond with intrepid cookbook authors Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.
Comments [12]Hip-hop activist Sister Souljah is back — with a new novel, “Midnight,” about love, race, and the gangster life.
Comments [25]Bad-boy poet Rimbaud lived hard, died young, and inspired generations — for better and worse. Novelist and biographer Edmund White tells the tale.
Comments [10]We talk about style and our times with the fashion designer who helped turn Target into Tar-jay.
Comments [20]We talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, and their lessons for Barack Obama.
Comments [18]Jhumpa Lahiri dazzled. Dexter Filkins brought the war home. Toni Morrison found “Mercy.” We’ll look back on these and many more of the best reads of 2008.
Comments [20]We look back on money, greed, and the bubble with a hedge-fund poet.
Comments [32]Helene Cooper and her amazing story of privilege and flight from Africa in “The House at Sugar Beach.”
Comments [8]A conversation with celebrated novelist E.L. Doctorow on creation from Genesis to Huck Finn, Hemingway to Einstein.
Comments [1]A new biography says he was much more than the world’s greatest lover.
Comments [9]Newsweek’s Jon Meacham talks about his new biography of President “Number 7,” Andrew Jackson, who broke down the doors of Washington for the common man.
Comments [16]The “Tipping Point” master Malcolm Gladwell talks about the ecology of success and where the super-successful get their edge.
Comments [61]Novelist Amitav Ghosh talks about 19th-century India and the opium trade in his sweeping new epic, “Sea of Poppies.”
Comments [3]Historian Niall Ferguson discusses the economic crisis of our time, right now.
Comments [29]Terry Tempest Williams takes us from Byzantine Italy to post-genocide Rwanda in search of “beauty in a broken world.”
Comments [14]Excerpts of “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” by Terry Tempest Williams.
Comments [6]The author of “Blue Highways” and “River-Horse” reports in on America’s backroads now.
Comments [5]An excerpt from “Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey” by William Least Heat-Moon
Comments [1]From “The Andromeda Strain” to”Jurassic Park,” “ER,” and “State of Fear,” we look at the blockbuster master’s long reach.
Comments [12]After 30 years’ silence, David Rhodes is back with small-town life and a cougar in the hay mow in his new book, “Driftless.”
Comments [12]A scary Halloween story. We’ll talk with Yale historian John Demos about the 2,000-year history of witch-hunting in the Western world.
Comments [25]A conversation with “Silver Palate” chef and cookbook star Sheila Lukins on what we eat now.
Comments [25]The unmentionable. How couples talk - and don’t talk - about old loves.
Comments [24]Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” Bestseller Russell Shorto reminds us it’s more complicated than that, in his new tale of faith, reason, and “Descartes’ Bones.”
Comments [17]THE MAN WHO DIED
IN THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF STOCKHOLM’S OLD Town stands a four-story building that was constructed during the busy, fussy period called the Baroque. Its red-brick facade is ornamented with sandstone cherubs and crests. Two upright cannons flank the entry; bearded busts gaze down sternly on those who approach the door. If you [...]
Two and a half thousand years ago, he wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war that had shaped his times.
Comments [6]Civility for uncivil times. A new biography of etiquette maven and entrepreneur Emily Post, who said mind your manners and much more.
Comments [5]EXCERPT FROM “FACTORY GIRLS: FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN A CHANGING CHINA” BY LESLIE T. CHANG
Comments [1]Candace Bushnell — “Sex and the City” author and chronicler of New York money — on life in the big city when it’s all coming down.
Comments [98]Prologue
It was only a part in a TV series, and only a one-bedroom apartment in New York. But parts of any kind, much less decent ones, were hard to come by, and even in Los Angeles, everyone knew the value of a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. And the script arrived on the same day as the [...]
Renowned author and nature writer Peter Matthiessen on the 30th anniversary of his landmark travel tale, “The Snow Leopard.”
Comments [18]Prologue: The View from Gate 14
Where is America?
America is on line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is [...]
Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan takes the long view of this American moment, with a call for unity and what she calls “Patriotic Grace.”
Comments [75]Billionaire Warren Buffett has waded deep on the financial crisis. We’ll look at the life and outlook of the “Oracle of Omaha.”
Comments [9]Jewish leader Edgar Bronfman calls for an era of “hope, not fear” for Jewish culture in North America.
Comments [68]The wisdom of the world and ages, in a new collection of proverbs from Zanzibar, from ancient days, and from the corner store.
Comments [215]1 EXISTENCE
1 God did not create hurry
Finland
2 Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank Him for not having given it wings
Ethiopia
3 The face came before the photograph
USA
4 Heroism consists in hanging on one minute longer
Norway
5 Everything comes to those who wait
England
6 There’s a time and a place for everything
England
7 The existence [...]
Philosopher Susan Neiman gets back to basics in her new book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.”
Comments [77]Frontline dispatches from where the fighting never ends. New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins on Iraq, Afghanistan, and “The Forever War.”
Comments [6]A pioneer in the field of neuro-economics explains the biological basis of truly innovative thought.
Comments [39]Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and a leading progressive voice on economics, calls for a transformative response to America’s economic crisis. We’ll hear his case.
Comments [35]Helene Cooper shares her amazing story of privilege and flight from Africa in “The House at Sugar Beach.”
Comments [4]Kerry Kennedy — daughter of Bobby and niece of JFK — joins us to talk about what it means to be Catholic now.
Comments [22]Forty years after Robert Pirsig began the journey that became “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” we retrace his tracks and his philosophy of life.
Comments [18]Reporter Farnaz Fassihi talks about ordinary Iraqis during the war’s darkest days.
Comments [5]How Do You Determine the Truth?
‘Truth exists - only lies are invented.’ - Georges Braque
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ESTABLISHING THE TRUTH IN RELATION TO
alternative medicine. Which therapies work and which ones are useless?
Which therapies are safe and which ones are dangerous?
These are questions that doctors have asked themselves for
millennia in relation to all forms of [...]
Author Anne Roiphe lost her husband of 39 years. Now she tells the unsentimental story of life after love.
Comments [20]New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, newly named MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, joined us last October to discuss his book “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century.”
Comments [7]Prologue
By Robert Timberg
Last year at the dedication of the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, former Attorney General Griffin Bell, a Democrat, introduced Senator John McCain, the featured speaker, with these words: “We often hear people now say, where are our heroes, where have all our heroes gone? Well, Senator McCain is an [...]
Anne of Green Gables turns 100, and looks surprisingly spry. We pay her a visit.
Comments [23]
Spies, lies and nukes. We’ll look at a new history of nuclear proliferation – and how the bomb really spread.
Comments [5]
Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus package outline is now front and center in Washington. What’s in it? And can it save the economy?
Comments [13]
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says global sex trafficking is 21st-century slavery — and he wants Barack Obama to abolish it.
Comments [31]
As Israel presses its war on Hamas, we’ll look at the Arab world’s reaction to the dire situation in Gaza, and what it means for the Middle East.
Comments [35]
