In the aftermath of the Lacedaemonian revolution, Thucydides writes, “Words had to change their meanings and take on those which were now given them.” Diane Ravitch’s Language Police explores the…
Five years ago, the Los Angeles Public Library started a new line of posters, featuring a large picture of a library card, with the slogan “a sign of intelligent life…
Fiction was not a panacea,” Azar Nafisi writes late in Reading Lolita in Tehran, “but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our…
Like many of my classmates, I have spent a large percentage of senior year wondering what my Yale education adds up to and which career paths are still open to…
“I wish I could have been different with Aaron,” says a tearful Angela as she is driven away from the harem house of ABC’s “The Bachelor.” The large, black limousine…
Why don’t more Americans read poetry? Reviewing Marie Ponsot’s newest collection of poems in The New York Times Book Review, David Orr offered this explanation: “One of the best things…
When designers are faced with the challenge of capturing the essence of a book in its cover, they are working in a single dimension. When the book becomes a movie,…
Joan Steitz Sterling Professor of Molecular Biology & Biophysics; Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute For me, reading Rosalind Franklin, the Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox, has been…
Advice to anyone over fifty: Shun the advice mode. Its best known model is Polonius, and we all know what happened to him. Stuck through the belly, behind an arras,…
Takashi Matsuoka’s first novel takes us to 1861, six years after the opening of Japan to the West. Genji, the young, charismatic Great Lord of Akaoka, welcomes a small group…
Peter Ibbetson