What do a rose, a falcon’s spiral descent, and Salvador Dali’s “Sacrament of the Last Supper” have in common? As Mario Livio explains, they all share a connection to phi,…
Johan Huizinga, the great historian of late medieval culture, was one of those rare figures in the study of ideas whose own stature and sensibility easily matched those of his…
“I am lost”—a short sentence in the first paragraph of “The Chinese Lesson”— sums up the main theme of A.M. Homes’s latest collection of short stories, Things You Should Know.…
Among this novel’s unexpected features is its setting: not Prague but Budapest, Hungary, in 1990. There, a collection of North American expatriates soaks up a bit of the newly reformed…
David Eggers’s fiction debut “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” falls staggeringly short of the high mark set by his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In “Genius,” Eggers…
In the summers of my youth, I devoured my father’s old children’s books. Among these was a collection of historical novels from the 1950s, each with the more unsavory details…
Writing about depression is a perilous practice. The temptation in seeking to realistically depict what Macbeth calls “the petty pace” of life for depressed people, the agonizing succession of empty…
The Partly Cloudy Patriot makes an unusual addition to the bedstands of most readers of American history. In this motley collection, 34-year-old Sarah Vowell keenly applies the lessons of popular…
By December 29, 1999, Abdel Wahab al-Effendi had been convinced of Islamism’s failure. Why should you care? He is a senior writer for al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem), a major Arabic-language…
An initiation involving coffins and naked mud wrestling, thousands of dollars given to members upon graduation, and financial support of Adolf Hitler: these are some of the myths about the…
Peter Ibbetson