Looking back at a great writer. Read more
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Category: Essays
How 2022 Became the Year of the Fragmented-Identity Novel
The tail end of 2022 has been marked by a worrying sense that the center really isn’t holding. Read more
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The Honesty of Pornography
Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture. Read more
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Writing Your Own Obituary Can Teach You How to Live
There’s a misconception that obituaries are about death. In reality, they’re about life. Sure, they include things like cause of death and the loved ones of the deceased. But a good obit should paint a vivid picture of the life someone lived, of how that person might want to be remembered. Read more
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Why Read Old Books? A Case for the Classic, the Unusual, the Neglected
Books of the past not only add to our understanding. They offer repose, renewal and perspective. Also, they can be fun. Read more
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The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions
We enjoy each other’s company. We drink coffee, we eat crackers, we get reacquainted with each other’s love lives, and we have an excuse to read the books that’ll appear on The New York Times’s notable list this year. And of course, reading the books is the point. The whole book club is predicated on the notion that reading these books will improve our minds in some way, and that it’ll contribute measurably to our intellectual lives. And yet, month after month, I leave each meeting feeling as if we’ve engaged in an empty, meaningless exercise. Read more
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Is It Wrong to Not Finish a Book?
Do you give a book a certain amount of time, or a certain number of pages, before giving up? Do you never give up? How do you decide? Read more
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No, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China’s People
The West has been wrong about China. It was long assumed that capitalism, the emergence of a middle class and the internet would cause China to eventually adopt Western political ideas. But these ideas cannot even begin to take root because the Communist Party has never allowed the intellectual soil needed for them to germinate. And it never will. Read more
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Pre-Revolution Chinese Detective Fiction
On China’s Golden Age of crime writing. Read more
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Reading While Incarcerated Saved Me. So Why Are Prisons Banning Books?
In Texas, books by Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda and even the former senator Bob Dole have been banned. Throughout the country, prison officials have rejected or tried to ban books about biology (too much nudity in the anatomical drawings), the Holocaust (some of the victims were pictured nude), sketching, dragons and even the moon (it could “present risks of escape,” according to one New York prison). At one point, Colorado prison officials blocked a prisoner from reading two of President Barack Obama’s memoirs because they were “potentially detrimental to national security,” although they later reversed that decision. Read more
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