bookeywookey

The subject matter of a book is often what determines whether or not I read it.  Who and what it is about leads us to anticipate our intere...

Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and author ( The First Scientist ) is excellent on how science works at Edge. Science is not about ...

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips ( On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane ) a sensible and erudite thinker about the human m...

Molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll wrote Remarkable Creatures (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) to both capture the e...

Language is identity, according to Diego Marani's New Finnish Grammar (2000).  It was originally written in Italian, recently transla...

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has been trying to lure a top university to create a school of engineering and applied scie...

Half-Blood Blues , by Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan , is a jazz musician's memory of his youth in Berlin and Paris on the eve of Worl...

Perhaps I am influenced by having just revisted Howards End , but I read Belinda McKeon's debut novel Solace as a portrait of two me...

E. M. Forster exhorts us to 'only connect' in his great novel Howards End .  I re-read this old favorite every few years.  This t...

According to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , the "War on Drugs," was...

As I approach the home stretch of a PhD in neuroscience, I find that that the audience I most enjoy writing for about this cutting edge fiel...

I covered neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's talk on the brain and free will at Cooper Union for Capital New York, hence the resounding ...

I decided to read the late Christopher Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters less because I have a driving interest in political essayist and n...

Award-winning journalist Katherine Boo has spent two decades, according to her bio, writing about how societies distribute opportunity and, ...

There is no use fixating on past mistakes, some advise. Stay in the present, say the gurus. But these approaches are anathema to the huma...

Quentin Tarantino's use of violence in films like Pulp Fiction is supposed to be commentary on violence in film and television, but I h...

I was struck in reading today's New York Times that the number of pieces on reading and books must have reached some sort of critical m...

The first volume of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, Nineteen Seventy-Four , is a violent thunderclap of a novel. It details the searc...

I have often wondered what it is about living in South America that leads writers to adopt the form of magical realism. Having read Purgato...

One of my very favorite writers, Richard Powers, who writes at the intersection of fiction and science, has written an inspiring essay about...