Books
I first met Paul Scott at Firpo’s bar on Chowringhee in Calcutta in 1944. READ MORE >>
Proprioception refers to the body’s sense of itself in space; or, more specifically, to a sense of its parts in relation to one another. READ MORE >>
Genre memoirs stink. I don’t mean the books themselves. Plenty of them do stink, surely, just like any other kind of book. But some of them are great. READ MORE >>
Americans tend to have three preoccupations about the recent past: the rights revolutions of the 1960s; Ronald Reagan, his conservative movement, and its legacy; and American-led globalization.1 Remarkably, to an American reader, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st C READ MORE >>
On Screen, 'Gatsby' is Beautiful—and Damned Boring
Five films later, Hollywood still doesn't get Fitzgerald's novel
F Scott Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13. He died in Hollywood in 1940, a has-been at the age of 44. His young secretary at the time, Frances Kroll, writes in her memoir that when that final royalty statement came through from Scribner’s, “the handful of sales proved that the author, himself, was the only purchaser. He told me about it, laughing bitterly.” READ MORE >>
Back in the benighted old days of the DSM-III—the third iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the American Psychiatric Association’s official catalog of the mental illnesses—my therapy patients included a 26-year-old man who came to see me due to his wife’s complaint that he’d “gotten out of control of himself.” The attractive couple had recently been united for life in a grand ceremony in her hometown, followed by an even splashier party on the highest floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. READ MORE >>
Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. READ MORE >>
It is very easy to sound like a cheeseball when talking about social media. This is especially true if you’re talking about how it’s changing the world, or how it’s making all of us more creative, or how it’s opening up previously unimaginable ways of relating to others. There are lots of people who talk this way, and for the most part, they are cheeseballs. READ MORE >>
Perhaps you have a coworker with a tendency toward oddball musings that everyone tolerates because he’s exceptionally intelligent and generally confines his weirdness to the lunch hour. Now let’s imagine he embraces his ruminative streak, and after spending a month at an Indonesian ashram he gives a speech to the whole office that contains the sentence “Don’t you see what’s happening here?” Jaron Lanier is that coworker. Only he’s operating on a larger scale. READ MORE >>
Biographies come in two kinds. The first and more conventional kind portrays the hero as an exception, a genius or a rebel against his time. (I say “his” time because traditional biographies celebrated great men; the arrival of biographies about women has been painfully slow.) We are all familiar with the exceptional biography because it has been and remains the most popular genre on the market—alongside that other study of the dead, the murder-mystery. READ MORE >>
