bookeywookey

If you have loved David Grossman's fiction, as I have (see here on To the End of the Land ), then you will appreciate this 2007 Paris ...

Three family sagas are the subject of this post.  What I like about this form is the intertwining of the characters' nar...

The life stories of two American Theatre makers monopolized my reading back in January: Elia Kazan: A Life , film and theatre director Kaz...

I talked to curious students about the Brain at BiobBase yesterday and took a really amazing tour through a 3-D brain in a planetarium...

This originally appeared here but I now post it below. When I heard that the opening event of Brain Awareness Week this year was on ...

Today, as more than 50,000 Russians march to honor Boris Y. Nemtsov, the Putin critic who was assassinated a few days ago, it seems timely t...

I have written enthusiastically of Charles Lambert's novels Little Monsters , Any Human Face ,  and  The View from the Tower .  His ne...

Last weekend, thanks to my friend Sheila , I attended a screening of a The Awful Truth , a 1937 screwball comedy about a married couple wh...

Some question the relevance of live theatrical performance in the age of Tivo and live streaming, but you wouldn't if you had seen two p...

I recently co-created a neuroscience lesson for TED-Ed.  It just went live.  Check us out!

Nowadays, the outcome of every scientific study is expected to be instantly useable by the public.  News media demands ready-made dietary ...

Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) is a stunner of a novel.  The Man Booker committee seems...

Two middle-aged spies are sitting in an apartment in the Christian Quarter, sipping tea and lying courteously to each other, as evening a...

If you liked Lev Grossman's first two books in the Magicians Trilogy- The Magicians   and The Magician King - you should love the con...

Ian Buruma's Year Zero: A History of 1945 (The Penguin Press, 2013), as is clear from its title, is a history written from the perspe...

When Virginia Woolf collected her essays on the uses of reading (the Elizabethans, Montaigne, Austen, etc) in a volume she called The C...

Stuart Rojstaczer is a funny guy.  A joke-telling, Jewish, geophysicist/applied mathematician from Milwaukee, Wisoconsin who has written a...

The force of the praise for W.G. Sebald from  the likes of Susan Sontag, A.S. Byatt, Richard Eder, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Dirda in The New...

Jenny Offill has written an unusual novel in Dept. of  Speculation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and I thank John Self for making me aware of ...

Deirdre Madden, an Irish fiction writer, is one of my favorite authors writing today.  Her work is elegantly structured, economical, her c...