Louis C.K. has an unforgettable bit about death. Wondering why people ask to donate their bodies to science after they die, he promises that he’ll give his to a higher cause: Sexual perversion.
In the sixth season of Mad Men, Nikki is on-screen for less than two minutes. In that time, we learn that she is a smug engaged person who disapproves of the white ad lunatics who employ her friend, Dawn, who she thinks is too subservient.
For those of us who cling to print, the topic of bookshelf organization seems to trigger a strong reaction.
If you pick up a kid’s book in the United States that’s about a person of color, chances are the character is black. And if the character is black, there’s a decent chance he or she is oppressed.
An American book world is ending.
There’s an old stereotype of women in an office, meeting by the water cooler to pass around an abused copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, its spine broken exactly where Connie and Mellors have their famous concurrent orgasm. In 2017, there is no water cooler, or tattered paperback—just a woman, her phone, and a tech company that thinks it knows what she wants.
Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Or Reddit at night.
Asia’s most powerful passport has elbowed past Europe’s supreme citizenship.
Today Amazon rolls out its biggest update to Kindle for iOS since the e-reader launched 10 years ago. Frankly, it’s a let-down in its most important area: actually buying books.
In a tiny town on the southwest coast of Scotland, there’s one bookstore for every hundred people who live there. And in the already unusually bookish town, one bookshop stands out: The people who work there are also paying for the pleasure.
Las Vegas, Nevada—America’s most famous city of sin—is looking to rebrand.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s world, Melania Trump is listless, and a bit racist.
Nearly half a century after Pablo Neruda supposedly died from natural causes, rumors are swirling again about foul play.
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has taken another stride toward realizing his vision for Japan.
Elon Musk is invoking the spirit of a dead poet to help him bore.
A book about a grieving Abraham Lincoln has won the UK’s biggest literary award.
Today a jury of five intellectuals will announce its pick for this year’s Man Booker prize, which awards the “finest in fiction” from the English-speaking world.
When the US president says “America first” to a room full of world leaders, he probably doesn’t mean to invoke the spirit of a 15th-century Italian. When Charles de Gaulle proclaimed, “La France n’est pas seule!” he likely wasn’t talking about a Germanic tribe from two millennia past. And Gandhi’s appeal to Britain to “quit India” definitely wasn’t just about the people living near the Indus River.
In a new book, Ivana Trump, the US president’s first wife, has some words of praise for her former husband. But she reserves much of the back-patting for herself.
A new ad from Dove had a short life before criticism online forced the Unilever soap and skin-care company to take it down.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out to make the impossibly long journey by sea west from Spain to India. The Italian explorer, of course, never did fulfill his promise to Spain’s king and queen. Instead he made contact with the people who lived in what Europeans would later call the Americas, setting off a chain of events that would lead to genocide of native peoples, the slave trade, colonial wars, and, eventually, two continents full of self-governing countries free of European rule.
This post contains spoilers to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go.
One challenge to treating a mental health problem is that a person can’t just point to a part of their body and say, “This hurts, please fix it.” Without a diagram to label, experts who study and treat mental health problems have to develop concepts and metaphors in order to communicate, and it can, understandably, get very complicated.
What’s to become of kids these days, with their damn pocket computers and inability to differentiate between bird species?
