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…
How do you write a 560-page book about the Rolling Stones without using the word “egotist”? Stephen Davis, the author of a new chronicle of the rock legends, tries to…
Sir Ernst Gombrich, the venerable humanist and scholar of art who died last year at the age of ninety-two, was not a great believer in historical epochs, but his passing…
As the British broadcaster Bernard Falk once said, “Americans are rather like bad Bulgarian wine; they don’t travel well.” Perhaps it is with these words in mind that British writer…
The penis goes by many names: “dipstick,” “peenie-weenie,” “lovepump,” “wonder worm.” Jonathan Franzen culls these synonyms from a list of no fewer than 45 in Dr. Susan Block’s 10 Commandments…
V. S. Naipaul was born into a world where books made little mention of life as he knew it. The books Naipaul read during his Trinidadian youth—fairytales, works of Moliere,…
The first task facing Richard Posner in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline is to find a way to define the rather nebulous cultural niche he wishes to study. He…
When David McCullough won the National Book Award in 1981 for Mornings on Horseback, his rendering of Theodore Roosevelt’s struggle to manhood, he said that his childhood in Pennsylvania amid…
Peter Ibbetson