The Exchange: Charles Bowden on Juárez, “Murder City”
For fifteen years, Charles Bowden has been writing about Juárez, the Mexican border city of 1.5 million whose name is synonymous with faceless, all-consuming violence. It’s a place where death has a...
View ArticleIn the News: Sesame Street Apps, Weapons of Mass Instruction
Now you can find Elmo, Bert, and Ernie in the App store.See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:Facebook Live: Now You Can Never LeaveIn the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at...
View Article1,000 Words: Another Brick in the Wall
Great images of books from around the world and the Web.See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:A Young Artist Confronts the Sinking of the TitanicPaul Strand’s Sense of ThingsClick Here to...
View ArticleIn the News: Flarf Attack, Sarcasm Software
A new iPhone app addresses common philosophical inquiries.See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:This Week in Fiction: Ian McEwan on Literary CrimesPostscript: Harper Lee, 1926-2016Harper...
View ArticleLet’s Get Physical
With Memorial Day looming, you may have heard so-called “bikini season” is upon us. Every year at this time, harried editors trot out that old chestnut: the “get-in-shape-for-the-summer” piece. Well,...
View ArticleIn the News: Book Expo Anxiety, Summer Reading for Girls
David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate thesis,”Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will,” will be published as a book in January of next year.See the rest of the story at...
View ArticleRethinking the Beach Read
Is there a more backhanded compliment than calling a book “a good beach read”? Fair or not, the “beach read” label indicates a certain lack of heft—both metaphorically and literally. Certainly nobody...
View ArticleThe Cookbooks of Summer, Part 2
The Book Bench is reviewing new and forthcoming cookbooks this week. In this post: “The Perfect Finish: Special Desserts for Every Occasion,” by Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark. My mission was clear. It...
View ArticleWordenfreude
When Ted Kennedy died last year, I marvelled at the wonderful, comprehensive obituary written by John M. Broder in the New York Times. One passage in particular stood out: “He was a Rabelaisian figure...
View Article1,000 Words: The Pagan Paperbacks of Graham Avenue
Great images of books from around the world and the Web.See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:Re: The Launch of Book Club 3.0Postscript: Jim Harrison, 1937—2016The Final Months of...
View ArticleWell Covered: Pulp Pride
It’s Pride Week here in New York, a time to celebrate the city’s thriving LGBT community and, of course, to commemorate the forty-first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. While the pre-Stonewall era...
View ArticleNever Let Me Go (to a Bad Movie)
Whether you found it “disquieting” like Margaret Atwood or “weirdly funny” like Louis Menand, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” is, it’s safe to say, one of the more esteemed novels of the past...
View ArticleDaydream Believer
Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes it feels like the news media, the scientific establishment, and our mothers are in cahoots to undermine every decision we make as adults. “Nearly 1 in 5 older women...
View ArticleBook-Club Confidential: Pie-Eyed Foodies in Brooklyn
THE MEMBERS: A staff member or two usually moderates the conversation, but otherwise the book club is totally open to the public. Usually, though, the attendees skew female.See the rest of the story at...
View ArticleA Visit to The Book Barn
As used bookstores go, Rodgers Book Barn might not have the instant name recognition of, say, The Strand, but what it lacks in branded tote bags it more than makes up for in charm. Located three hours...
View ArticlePlagiarizin’ Pols
As we learned earlier this week, Sarah Palin likes to make up words; other politicians, it would seem, are less creatively inclined when it comes to their writing. Last week, the Denver Post revealed...
View ArticleThe Exchange: Natasha Vargas-Cooper on “Mad Men”
“Mad Men,” which returns to AMC this Sunday night, is a television show that sometimes thinks it’s a novel—in particular, a John Cheever novel. Like Cheever, the Draper family lives in Ossining, New...
View ArticleBook ‘Em: Chicken Soup for the Criminal Soul
Call us idealists, but at the Book Bench, we believe that reading is a good thing. As Macy pointed out earlier this week, the more one reads, the less likely one is to become famous for getting drunk...
View ArticleYou’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin makes the case that “the end of men” may be upon us. More specifically, she argues that a postindustrial economy has made men’s traditional advantages...
View ArticleBabar on the Big Screen
Last week, Deadline New York (the latest outpost of Nikki Finke’s growing blog empire) reported that “Twilight” producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey had made a deal to create a series of family films...
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