“A question raised almost at once (and periodically revived) was why Nietzsche was proving so popular here: ‘What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture…
Colby Buzzell was a bored 25 year-old, weary of working dead-end, hand-to-mouth jobs when he decided it would be more exciting and pay better to shoot machine guns in Iraq.
Eleanor Friedberger Last Summer (Merge) Last Summer, the first solo release from Eleanor Friedberger, half of the Brooklyn duo The Fiery Furnaces, is, for better or for worse, a summer…
The government thinks it can track anyone using GPS 24/7 without a warrant… here’s hoping the Supreme Court says differently. Republic Wireless unveils a new, contract-free $19/month cell plan that…
“Eliot and Dostoevsky were nearly exact contemporaries. Born within two years of each other, they died less than two months apart, Eliot in 1880, Dostoevsky in 1881. For both of…
“Here in China, nearly 195 million people are hooked on a kind of literature that is virtually unknown in the West, but that is rapidly transforming its authors and a…
Some friends of Housing Works Bookstore are hosting a marathon reading of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. It’s only 45 pages, but it’s an exciting…
What if J.K. Rowling had killed off Ron Weasley, or Melville had killed of Starbuck, or Fitzgerald had killed off Daisy Buchanan? The Awl explores characters who nearly died in…
Carl Zimmer’s Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed reveals the crossroads between the sciences and tattoo culture. The result is “a weird and wonderful almanac of the lovable geek…
“Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Bolaño’s chair, Smith’s father’s favourite cup, Virginia Woolf’s cane and bed. It is as if she were furnishing a home with these photographs for the ghosts of…