Daniel Rourke /stream

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And…

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“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with…

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Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed…

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In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for…

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Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing…

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We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting.…

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There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic. Back in…

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When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets…

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In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on…

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Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into…

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Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about…

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This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are…

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When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead.…

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In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared…

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People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity,…

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WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And…

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In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided…

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by Jorge Luis Borges I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who…

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A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural…

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IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist, Seth Price presents an essay challenging the traditional photo essay format. Ritualized Unknowing People keep trying to get a…

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It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from? Judging from his new…

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And…

Bookmark

“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with…

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Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable…

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In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for…

Bookmark

We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting.…

Bookmark

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The…

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When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets…

Bookmark

In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on…

Bookmark

Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into…

Bookmark

Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about…

Bookmark

Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might…

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When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead.…

Bookmark

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity,…

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Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only a…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And…

Bookmark

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided…

Bookmark

by Jorge Luis Borges I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who…

Bookmark

A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural…

Bookmark

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for…

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It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from? Judging from his new…

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Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What,…