Books and Ideas

My Guitar Gently Weeps My Guitar Gently Weeps

"I was in a highly unshaved and tatty state," John Lennon said of his 1966 meeting with a certain conceptual artist, then mounting her first show at London's Indica Gallery.

Nov 21, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Alex Abramovich

The Humanitarian Temptation The Humanitarian Temptation

In 2000, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan posed a question to the Millennium Summit of the UN: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on s...

Nov 21, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams

A Sex of One’s Own A Sex of One’s Own

Nature versus nurture was always too simple a formulation. Now, we ask: Is it chance, choice, family, culture, hormones or genes that determine who we are and whom we love?

Nov 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Julia M. Klein

Atop the Volcano Atop the Volcano

Gioconda Belli--poet, novelist, society belle reborn as Sandinista comrade--has written a memoir of the Nicaraguan struggle that reads like a romance--a romance with politics a...

Nov 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Anderson Tepper

Mystery in Milan Mystery in Milan

On March 16, 1972, readers in Italy and throughout the publishing world were shocked by the day's headlines.

Nov 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / André Schiffrin

The Scourge of Baltimore The Scourge of Baltimore

As truth-tellers, journalists remain the undocumented aliens of the knowledge industry, operating in an off-the-books epistemological economy apart from philosophers and scient...

Nov 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carlin Romano

The Naked Truth The Naked Truth

If you've never set foot in the likes of Club Paradise, Scarlett's, New York Dolls, Secrets, Peepers or the boldly named Booby Trap (yes, it does exist), your image of a strip ...

Nov 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hillary Frey

Update on Arming America Update on Arming America

Michael Bellesiles, the historian accused of research falsification in his book Arming America, a study of gun culture, announced on October 25 that he was resigning from Emory...

Nov 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / The Editors

Big Labor’s Little Problem Big Labor’s Little Problem

At a "Lean Workplace School" for union members, sponsored by the monthly magazine Labor Notes in 1996, the discussion centered around how to fight employers' speed-up and worke...

Nov 6, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jane Slaughter

Sociobiology and You Sociobiology and You

If Steven Pinker's latest 500-page treatise on the brain, The Blank Slate, serves any wider purpose in the popular discussion of science issues, it will, one hopes, be the fina...

Oct 31, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Steven Johnson

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