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