In Praise of Gardens
David E. Cooper reviews Damon Young's "Voltaire’s Vine and Other Philosophies: How Gardens Inspired Great Writers."
All Reviews
Secrets and Lies
Kim came to the DPRK to escape her sorrows. But she should have known that a place with such systemic problems could not possibly offer her solace.
Don’t Eat This Marshmallow: Cooling the Fever for Self-Control
"Like a real marshmallow, like any of the temptations offered children in his now-famous experiment, Mischel’s new book — The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control — is a trigger for our desire."
Holy Terrors
"The weighty task of wrenching terrorism and martyrdom apart and policing the divide between them takes place on a daily basis in news commentary and water cooler conversation."
Perpetual War for a Perpetual Piece (of the Action)
The bad news from one of the finest national security journalists working today.
Finding Words
"… it is a decent game, English that is, but everything real happens in Spanish."
Albania’s Prophet of the Surveillance State
Like all serious novels, "Twilight of the Eastern Gods" is a novel of history.
A Fitting Tribute
The State of Surveillance
"We didn’t particularly set out to write a book about state-sponsored surveillance."
Atheism and Its Discontents
What makes atheism so radically different is its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world.
The New New Africa
Olufemi Terry on Denis Johnson
Carnage Hill, or Frank Bascombe’s Late Years
Maybe a good life is just living long enough to figure out some essential truth.
God Would Bend
On Blake Butler’s '300,000,000'
The Bob Odenkirk Files
Considering the comedian’s legacy, and future, in light of his recent book.
William Gibson’s Breakfast Burrito
“The Peripheral is thus less interested in specifying two fully articulated hypothetical futures than in inviting us to reflect on our present-day imaginative relationship to the future …”
After The Fall
The untold story of Manchester’s post-punk outfit The Fall and its talented, volatile lead singer Mark Edward Smith.
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