Shoplifters may be the only criminals for whom the nightmare of getting caught ends with a blush. The anxiety isn’t that shoplifting is illegal, exactly. It’s that it is not illegal enough. The fleur de mal looks embarrassingly like a daisy. “Stealing household trinkets remains too shameful for words […],” writes Rachel Shteir in The Read More
Canon formation is a funny thing: the notion of a canon in any given field implies fixity, yet there is always plate tectonics at work, a shifting that makes room for new works and surfaces neglected ones. Artists who struggle for recognition dream of historical vindication, reminding themselves that Read More
Our brains are made of “three pounds of the most complex material we’ve discovered in the universe,” David Eagleman informs us in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon, 304 pages, $26.95). Still, if you remove half of a child’s brain before he is “about 8 years old,” the child will be fine. “Let Read More
In the summer of 1996, without really trying, I secured an internship at Condé Nast. It was an unlikely turn of events for someone who had no publishing connections and who, just weeks earlier, had entered the building as a temp on a yearlong break from college. The temp placement agency had installed me at Read More
In Boston, seven or eight years ago, after a reading Geoff Dyer gave to promote his Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of travel essays whose ethos is best encapsulated by the Bhagavad Gita’s claim that wise is the man who finds “action in inaction,” I dined with Mr. Read More
In 1978, when People wanted to interview Susan Sontag, the writer wondered aloud how Samuel Beckett might respond given the same opportunity. It was not unusual for her to invoke Beckett in this way. “When she worried she was making too many compromises,” Sigrid Nunez recalls in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (Atlas, Read More
A young-adult novel is like porn: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Deep in the oddly innocent pages of The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (Random House, 352 pages, $25), I found myself wondering why it all felt so familiar. The heroine’s succession of clear-cut quests, her earnest determination to Read More
As a child, Margaux Fragoso habitually punched random women riding on the bus and was secretly unnerved when her parents’ married friends kissed each other; she thought kissing was for fathers and daughters, and middle-aged women were for punching. But she could never forgive her father for telling the hairdresser (in Spanish, which he refused Read More
The deli is a good place to stage New York stories. There are lots of things to do there, from grocery shopping to armed robbery, and the setting makes them feel both particular and universal. Once, in our early months in the city, my roommate received a pack of Camels on credit at our corner Read More
It’s been said that Parisians romanticize the French countryside and the rural French deify Paris as fervently as New Yorkers dismiss the rest of America and real Americans disavow New York. Edward Glaeser, who was raised in Manhattan and is now an economist at Harvard, has made turning our provincials on to the metropole a Read More
