Non Fiction Archive |
Strength in What Remains: A journey of remembrance and forgiveness - His name --- Deogratia --- means “thanks to God” in Latin. When we first meet him, Deo is 24, a third-year medical student. But there’s no way he can finish
Stuff White People Like - A cup of Fair Trade java is brewing in the kitchen. Your six-year-old is reciting the alphabet --- in French. The Sunday Times lies on the table
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy - "Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.” - E.B. White Robert H. Frank is the HJ Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at
Summer Reading, 2015 - Summer. The catalogs I get from publishers send the message in a way I'll charitably call "timeless." But really, the summer offerings look to me like déjà vu all over
Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society -
The Arc of The Boomers: A Guest Butler’s essay - Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan made his Broadway debut as Samuel opposite Kevin Kline in “The Pirates of Penzance.” He was nominated for a Tony Award for creating Asparagus/Growltiger in
The Best of I.F. Stone - Guest Butler Eric Jason Silverman is a New Yorker, a published poet, and at work on a novel about a spiritual leader living in suburbia. He lives in California with
The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown’ and the Last Years of Hollywood - Several readers have asked if there's an American film I value as highly as the films of the Iranian Asghar Farahadi or the Italian Bernardo Bertolucci or....but you get the
The Book of General Ignorance - Stupidity. It’s the word of the year, every year now, it seems. Somebody --- I won't type the name --- spent years saying that you really don’t need to know
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future - “Nature always bats last.” That old warning about our degrading environment no longer seems to apply. Now Nature bats every day. Drought, storms, melting ice and rising oceans --- the bad
The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women - Elisabeth Badinter has been voted “the most important intellectual” in France. Why, you wonder, would American women hate a French intellectual? Scorn, sure. Be intimated by, understood. But hate? Try this: Badinter is
The Dog Dialed 911 - The Dog Dialed 911
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe - The Russians had been driven out of Afghanistan, and now the militias that had defeated them were in charge. The Mujahideen were fierce and they were cruel. And they hated women. That
The Economist Book of Obituaries - No fun is more welcome than unlikely fun. I never thought “The Economist” and “obituaries” would find themselves in the same sentence. But English newspapers are uncommonly imaginative.
The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags - Daphne Merkin is frighteningly intelligent. You only have to read a few paragraphs of her writing to know that she’s read, heard and seen everything written, recorded and filmed, and
The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve - If you want your child to get into a good pre-school in my city, it’s not just a matter of forking over $15,000. First you have to get an application. And
The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People - They weren’t prosperous to start with, but it suddenly seems that there’s no money to be found and no food they can afford. The government passes legislation to help them.
The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America - Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan is an award-winning actor, singer and playwright. He has recently completed a memoir about his adventures, internal and otherwise. California criminalized LSD possession in
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World - Our best teacher is Nature, though we frequently ignore it --- even those of us who say, and know, "Nature always bats last." The specific instructor here is trees,
