Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane. …more

Leïla Marouane’s 2010 novel The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris layers identity upon identity as it unravels the story of an Algerian-born Parisian banker. …more

Andrew O’Hagan’s playful novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend, Marilyn Monroe follows one terrier around the mid-20th century as he pontificates on Plutrach, Nietzsche, and acting. …more

A new volume of stories by Mavis Gallant traces the writer’s development from early stories of bewilderment and disappointment to the sharp, incisive later work of a master. …more

Rebecca Solnit’s 2003 book, River of Shadows, was about the 19^th century photographer Eadward Muybridge. …more

If you only read one article on health care this year, consider making it the same one as everyone else: Atul Gawande’s “The Cost Conundrum.”

Gawande is great on paradoxes, mysteries and ethical conundrums in the practice of medicine, and this greatness of analysis extends to our health care delivery system. …more

Blogging and stillness seem to be contradictory activities: I, along with many others, think of blogging as the relentless and hasty documentation of modern life on the go, news-in-brief for busybusy people. And yet what bloggers are often attempting is to draw careful attention to the overlooked and underseen, to stop us in our tracks and make us wonder at what we might otherwise miss.
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Yet another reason to park your child in front of classical music appreciation videos: she’ll be first responder for your next baby! The Sound of Passion.

Our view of the world is so often sculpted by front page and home page, so here is a look at some long-ongoing crises of self-determination that only occasionally surface in the news:

First, Nigeria and Big Oil. I’m not condoning militarism, terrorism, or sabotage, and neither are most Nigerian nationals, even though there’s a lot of oil on that slippery slope to human rights violations. Take a moment to remember Ken Saro-Wiwa as oil prices rise…

Relevant links: …more

John Keats’s tribute to sleep—called, fittingly, “To Sleep”—equates it, winsomely, with death. The poem is an invocation of that state which can be elusive, particularly to those with overactive or anxious minds, or small kids, or, in my case, both. It begins: …more

Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows traces one woman’s path through a violent century. …more

Hermione Lee’s marvelous biography of Virginia Woolf tells us that Woolf applied the same clear-eyed and unstinting analysis to her father, Leslie Stephen, that she did to most of her subjects, subjects that tended to be Victorian, domestic, and preoccupied with the mind. On her father, the upshot, for Woolf, was this: “Stephen’s crucial weakness, she thought, was that he allowed himself to behave like a genius (badly, that is), whereas he was, as he once told her, ‘only a good second class mind.’” …more

The most recent book I have loved–a term I apply only to those few books that get a place in my personal canon–was Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba. Guillermoprieto’s books are great but few, so I saved this most recent one for years before reading it as slowly as I could. It’s the story of her strange sojourn, as a relatively apolitical young Mexican-American, in Cuba in 1970, when she taught at the National School of Dance. Guillermoprieto is abjectly honest (or gives that appearance) and turns clear eyes on herself, her companions and her host country, paralleling her inadequacies as a visitor and teacher with one of the early public failures of the Revolution, the zafra, an attempt at a 10 million ton harvest of sugar cane. Both she and the Revolution were young but would age fast that year, and the hindsight of forty years lets her write this aching, ugly yet beautiful, account.

It’s a tricky thing, a memoir of a death: you know how it’s going to end. The challenge for the writer (not only with regard to the conclusion) is making the inevitable unknown. …more