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Nonfiction

Oppositional Thinking
the idea that the brain's hemispheres, though linked, worked independently has a long history....
Gary LachmanFeb 9, 2012
- Nonfiction
- Science & Technology
Valediction
AT THE PEAK OF HIS CAREER and in the full ripeness of his abundant talents, the intellectual historian Tony Judt was struck down by Lou Gehrig's disease. He died before his 63rd birthday. Judt was someone America needed in these rancid ...
G.J. MeyerFeb 8, 2012
- History
- Nonfiction
The Symphony of Self
Some will be uncomfortable with Damasio’s physical-monist peeking-under-the-hood of our most private inner workings ......
Aaron P. BlaisdellFeb 7, 2012
- Nonfiction
- Science & Technology
Disjecta Membra: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole's "Sacred Trash"
Wading waist-deep into this hoard of history, smothered in the dust of centuries — he called it "genizaschmutz" — Schechter sifted for four weeks....
Benjamin BalintFeb 5, 2012
The Pleasures of Listening
Bon mots abound....
Glen RovenFeb 1, 2012
- Music
- Nonfiction
The Scholar’s Art: On Susan Stewart
GIVEN THE MANY USES and abuses of the word "freedom," it stands to reason that our poetic history has produced a little epitome of its vexations. The concept of a "free" poetry is all but an oxymoron: Poetry is concerned, above ...
Ange MlinkoJan 19, 2012
- Nonfiction
- Poetry
Postal Modernism
On two volumes of letters by Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett....
Michael NorthJan 17, 2012
- Nonfiction
The Art of Slacking: Paul Hendrickson's "Hemingway's Boat"
FOR BOTH HIS MASTER OF ELLIPTICAL English prose and his flamboyant persona, Ernest Hemingway may well be the most influential American author of the 20th century. "I almost wouldn't trust a young novelist — I won't speak for the women here, but ...
Steven G. KellmanJan 17, 2012
- Nonfiction
Back to the Garden: Jane Shaw's "Octavia, Daughter of God"
IN STYLE IT TOOK THE SHAPE of any other garden party, that signal diversion of the interwar years. Tea and jellies, dancing and croquet, "lemon-ade" and clock golf: Octavia gave a Garden Party to all at the Centre, in the Garden ...
Lindsay RecksonJan 12, 2012
- History
- Nonfiction
Pop Will Meet Itself: Simon Reynolds's "Retromania"
Whatever your take on this classically postmodern conundrum, you're liable to come away from Retromania with more questions than you had going in....
Mike McGonigalJan 9, 2012
- Cultural Studies
- Nonfiction
Household Saint
21’s eloquence is visual, and it is a very real eloquence....
David RothJan 9, 2012
- Nonfiction
- Young Adult & Children’s Literature
Discoveries: John Jeremiah Sullivan
JUST WHEN YOU THINK AMERICA is going down the tubes, you read John Sullivan's essays (or David Foster Wallace's, or Rebecca Solnit's) and you think how strange and varied this country is, how huge and relentless and funny. It has been ...
Susan Salter ReynoldsJan 7, 2012
- Memoir
- Nonfiction
Thoroughly Modern Elsa
Since her rediscovery by scholars over a decade ago, photographs of the Baroness have become, in their way, as iconic of the era of Dada as any....
Brian Kim StefansDec 16, 2011
- Art
- Nonfiction
The Girl with the Father Tattoo
And so it was that daughters, perhaps more relationally adept on average, became the more fertile conduit for paternal ambition....
Michele Pridmore-BrownDec 16, 2011
- Nonfiction
Looking Promiscuously
Hainley’s occasional lashings are needles meant to puncture consensus....
Brian SholisOct 20, 2011
- Art
- Nonfiction
King of the Contrarians: Chuck Eddy’s “Rock and Roll Always Forgets”
For Eddy, recognizing a revolution often means writing like a revolution, with whatever messiness and tedium that implies....
Josh LanghoffSep 29, 2011
- Nonfiction
The Paranoid Style: J. Hoberman’s “Army of Phantoms”
The most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published....
Steven J. RossSep 27, 2011
- Nonfiction
Cherry Bomb: On Ellen Willis
FOR A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, music can feel downright limiting sometimes. When I was 26 and reviewing records for Time Out New York (the weekly magazine's pop section was then in its golden age) and The Advocate (the gay one) and a ...
Sara MarcusSep 19, 2011
- Nonfiction
Returning to the Scene
JANET MALCOLM'S Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, an expansion of a 2010 New Yorker essay, explores Mazoltuv Borukhova’s trial for the murder of her husband, Daniel Malatov. Malatov was brazenly assassinated in a Queens playground in ...
Michael WashburnAug 18, 2011
- Law
- Nonfiction
The Bridge
Beauty linked to life and death....
Joy HorowitzMay 13, 2011
- Nonfiction
The Sign
It is almost entirely abstract....
Joy HorowitzMay 13, 2011
- Nonfiction