Over at The Economist, a Q & A with Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant:

POLITICS and fashion are not mutually exclusive interests—a person might pledge to ProPublica only to enjoy a Style.com slideshow moments later. In literature, however, they tend to...

Virginia Postrel in Bloomberg (via Andrew Sullivan):

Anyone -- a local teenager, a traveling businessman, a married mother of four, an illegal immigrant, even a student at a Jesuit university -- can walk into my neighborhood CVS any time, day or night, and, for less than $30, buy a 36-count...

Over at Ibishblog, Hussein Ibish and Artistic Director of The York Shakespeare Company Seth Duerr offer differing reads of Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Coriolanus. First, Ibish:

Fiennes' meta-multimedia production captures this inability of Coriolanus to function effectively in the staged...

Hank Willis Thomas over at The Root:

The generation before me was defined by soul. Soul was a virtue born out of the spirituality of gospel, the pain of blues, and the progressive pride of being the standard-bearers of civil rights. They were stylish like Shaft, but noble like Martin. They sang...

Over at the Telegraph, "The Death of Poor Joe, a one minute-long silent film based on an episode in Dickens' novel 'Bleak House', was filmed in Brighton in 1901."

Laura Agustín over at Naked Anthropologist:

Men at the higher end of the evolutionary scale: That is how one man has described men who want to save sex slaves, seeking to differentiate themselves from less civilised, bad men – the ones that buy sex. In this idea, being a Good Man is achieved...

Akash Kapur in the NYT:

ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its...

From Edge:

As you march through or dance around in this book, you'll see that some of the entries describe the patterns of the world. Nicholas Christakis is one of several of scholars to emphasize that many things in the world have properties not present in their parts. They cannot be...

Written at the twilight high water of American modernism in the early Sixties, chapters scattered among obscure literary magazines like the limbs of Osiris, nearly published as a book by Black Sparrow in 1971, circulated incomplete among poets in samizdat photocopy from 1979, contracted for...

From Smithsonian:

Born in suburban Long Island, Morris graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After a stint of cello study in France, he talked his way into the Princeton graduate philosophy seminar of Thomas Kuhn, an icon of postmodernism, the man who coined the term “paradigm...

The grand view of history has traditionally offered two paths for the interpretation of events. The first imagines social trends rising up from below to sweep humanity along in their irrepressible, all-powerful waves. The other dreams of iconic figures who shape history through their own...

At the core of the novel, which Nadas took 18 years to write, are the major catastrophes and upheavals of the last century. They are the magma that is always present but usually not visible. The book tells of deportations, the closing of a camp at the end of the war and marauding prisoners;...