Ethical Vertigo and the Human Genome: On Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘The Gene’

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If ethical issues in genetics are to be solved, we’ll need not only skepticism and compassion, but also a clear understanding of the humans our choices affect.
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Pussy Riot: One Woman’s Vagina Takes on Japan’s Obscenity Laws

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The obscenity charges against Rokudenashiko stemmed from her art, which involved making things from casts of her manko (vagina). She had turned her manko into buttons, dioramas, and cell phone covers.
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The Poetry of Small Things: On Ruth Goodman’s ‘How to Be a Tudor’

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You wouldn’t expect the intricacies of Tudor baking, brewing, ploughing, cooking, needlework, painting, dancing, and card-playing to hold an audience rapt, and yet Goodman makes the minutia of everyday life a half-millennia ago tremendously interesting.
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He Doesn’t Wear a Game Face: On David Foster Wallace’s ‘String Theory’

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The sense one gets reading these pieces is of a discovery process, the author stumbling sentence-by-sentence toward understanding -- a task to which he wholly devotes his profane, fucked-up, intellectually omnivorous self.
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It Gets into Your Bones: On Kate Tempest’s ‘The Bricks That Built the Houses’

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Working hard, going to college, saving money — in the old days, before the arrival of the moneyed class, these things were believed to guarantee a secure future. Now, they might not even lead to secure employment.
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Here’s to the Cowardly Ones: On Dmitri Shostakovich and Emotional Rebellion

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If Shostakovich succumbed to power, it was in an effort to leave the world with beauty that cannot be marred by power.
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Die a Million People: On ‘The Colonel Who Would Not Repent’

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Salil Tripathi's book serves as a primer to the current crisis -- including the extremists’ slaying of foreigners, non-Muslims, and writers that has begun since the book’s completion.
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The Revolution Has Been Televised: On Big Sports and Big Money

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In 1966, baseball’s reserve clause that bound a player to one team meant that the average major league player’s salary was $14,000. Topps paid each exactly $125 to put them on a bubble-gum card.
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Upscale, Artisanal Bullshit of the Highest Order

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My experience reading 'Gone with the Mind' spawned an array of adjectives, often in the span of a few seconds. Absurd, juvenile, sophisticated, selfless, masturbatory, profound. That’s Mark Leyner, and he knows it.
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Ward Farnsworth Doesn’t Mess Around: On ‘Classical English Metaphor’

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For those who venture into Farnsworth’s level-headed take on murky abstractions, the benefits will be less far-reaching, less comprehensively employable, but they will also be richer, longer-lasting, and as demystifying and powerful as the strongest metaphors.
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The End of the Self Is the End of the Universe

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Sadness might seem too sincere an emotion to ascribe to a novel written by a postmodernist, but Zero K pushes its readers to feel.
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Two Women, Two Lives, Two Stories: Together, but Brutally Alone

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With 'Eleven Hours,' Erens continues interrogating the core contradiction that threads through two earlier novels: The simultaneity of twinness and aloneness.
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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The shifting landscapes are the first of many disorientations that Wood sets up for his reader in this haunting narrative.
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In the Middle of the Forever War

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Collect the dead. Tend the wounded. Gather evidence. Hunt. Remember.
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Black Berets Unite: In Praise of Pretentiousness

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A partial list of things labeled pretentious in my home town: indie rock, foreign films, mobile phones, vegetarian diets, keeping one’s maiden name, carrying bottled water, wearing all black, drinking wine, reading The New York Times, dressing androgynously, taking self-portraits, drinking Starbucks, practicing yoga.
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Lurid Tales of Crime and Aristocratic Extravagance

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The primary pleasure in 'Making Monte Carlo' comes from watching the various eccentrics, lowlifes, high-rollers, and famous artists -- -- Edvard Munch, Karl Marx, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel -- stroll in to take a seat at the table.
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There Is No Redemption Here

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Kelly Kerney has crafted a story and a set of characters that require her readers to look squarely at what Americans -- especially white Americans, the demographic most comfortable in the United States’ myth of moral superiority -- will do to maintain our innocence, and what we will do, and have done, in the face of guilt.
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Origin Stories: The Darker Side of J.R.R. Tolkien

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This story marks Tolkien’s earliest use of verse and song within a prose narrative, a stylistic element that pointed to his love of Germanic and Nordic sagas and would become a defining feature of his best-known works.
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