Books and Ideas

What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

I've never had a strong appetite for travel literature.

Dec 7, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stacy Torres

False Promises False Promises

In American Dream, his masterful new book about welfare reform, Jason DeParle brings together two groups of people who rarely seem to meet: welfare policy-makers and welfare reci...

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan

Body Heat Body Heat

After the Kinsey Report but before the first Penthouse Forum, John Updike wrote, "He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs.

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Mark Lotto

The War That Never Was The War That Never Was

As war threatened Europe in the 1930s, a physicist turned to a psychiatrist to help understand the impending violence.

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Russell Jacoby

Hostile Obituary for Derrida Hostile Obituary for Derrida

On October 10, the New York Times published a front-page obituary for French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Ross Benjamin

The Interpreters of Maladies The Interpreters of Maladies

Derrida was often misunderstood, but rarely worse than in his New York Times obituary. Ross Benjamin explains, in a web-only feature.

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Adam Shatz

Days of Rage Days of Rage

On November 4, 1979, a few months after the collapse of the Iranian monarchy and the inauguration of Iran's Islamic Republic, a group of college students calling themselves the M...

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Reza Aslan

Of Love and Other Demons Of Love and Other Demons

The first chapter of Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote follows our hero's adventures from 1936 through 1948, a particularly heady period of his life.

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Nathaniel Rich

Little Big Man Little Big Man

No musical life has been told more often than Wagner's. Biographies have wafted incense around him, or been incensed by him.

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Paul Griffiths

The Shock of the Old The Shock of the Old

These remarks introduced a centennial tribute to Isaac Bashevis Singer in October at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Morris Dickstein

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