“Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them… Love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up… Love your heart. For this is the prize.” Thinking lately about what it means to have the right heart, which intimates the question of what it means to […]
A love story, a time story, an invitation not to mistake difference for defect and to welcome, across the accordion scales of time and space, diversity as nature’s wellspring of resilience and beauty. Great children’s books move young hearts, yes, but they also move the great common heart that beats in the chest of humanity […]
Enlarge / A housewife proudly presents her indispensable Pyrex kitchenware (1955). Ainissa Ramirez tells the story of its invention, and how it molded human behavior in turn, in her book, The Alchemy of Us. (credit: Chaloner Woods/Getty Images) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, […]
A new novel about what it’s like being the only Black person at a tech startup; a sardonic guide to surviving office life (for whenever we go back); and a bundle of new essays from one of the most lauded American writers of her generation. Those are just a few of our 10 new books […]
The wonder of wading into the black lake boiling with light. What is it about the human animal that impels us to interrupt the elemental elegance and perpetual incompleteness of a perfect ellipse with an arbitrary point we call a beginning? And yet here we are, once every three hundred and sixty-some days, marking the […]
The start of a new year means the end of copyright protection for a variety of books, songs and movies—and a bonanza of free titles for pop-culture fans. For 2021, these will include works by novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, actor Buster Keaton, composer Irving Berlin and mystery master Agatha Christie. These are […]
The pandemic forced public libraries to close their doors, but they remained resilient in supporting local communities by moving important programs, tools, and resources online as much as possible. The pandemic also renewed (pardon the pun) people’s relationships with the library, encouraging readers and listeners to download digital services like OverDrive and its digital reading […]
A glance over the shoulder of time to reveal the patterns, themes, and ideas that steady us and shelter us in the tempest of life. Like every year, this annual glance over the shoulder of time is a composite of the essays that most resonated with readers and those I most enjoyed writing, the overlap […]
Enlarge / These might look like your standard leather-bound texts, but they are actually bound in human skin—a practice known as “anthropodermic bibliopegy.” All five are housed in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. (credit: Mütter Museum/College of Physicians of Philadelphia)) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So […]
As editors feverishly put to bed any remaining “Best of 2020” lists, work is well underway to review all the new books arriving in 2021. (Yes, 2020 is, mercifully, almost over.) Here is a sampling of nonfiction and fiction titles to consider reading as they will be published in the first half of 2021. “World […]