Displaying articles for: December 2009

Sinister Yogis

A history of yoga leads to a history of yogis -- and finds something far more colorful than a lineage of meditation and enlightenment. Read more...

The Golden Age of Television

A new collection brings together the best of the American teleplays of the 1950s, when the tube was alight with compelling drama. Read more...

How to Roast a Lamb

A sophisticated take on classics of Greek cuisine, from the chef-owner of the celebrated restaurant Anthos. Read more...

Liver

A quartet of novellas that draw inspiration from a vital but mysterious organ. Read more...

Tom Jobim: Brazil’s Ambassador of Song

The Brazilian master of the bossa nova is the subject of a multipart video portrait that tracks him from his Rio roots to global fame. Read more...

The Gift of Thanks

Circles of giving, across centuries and continents. Read more...

Objectified

In an age of disposable mass-production, a celebration of beauty in the aesthetics of everything from the toothpick to the iPhone. Read more...

The Pleasures of Cooking for One

A cookbook for when dinner doesn't require a party. Read more...

Stories in Stone

The geological secrets quietly immured in the walls of cottages and cathedrals. Read more...

The Dead

John Huston's directorial swan song glories in its sensitivity to its source in James Joyce's haunting story. Read more...

Knives at Dawn

Annals of the Bocuse d'Or -- the "culinary Olympics" that pit the world's most proficient chefs against one another. Read more...

Death in the Garden

Luis Buñuel’s drama of survival and betrayed ideals shows the range of the director's filmmaking mastery. Read more...

News of the World

Poems that evoke the dynamism and variety of midcentury America -- and elsewhere.

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25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom

The comics legend and creator of Watchmen makes a case for the cultural importance of sex in art. Read more...

Unpacking My Library

Architects uncover the foundations of their thinking in this revealing look at how they build their book collections. Read more...

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

Terry Teachout's new biography of the jazz patriarch evokes memories of indelible moments in listening. Read more...

The Age of Empathy

A primatologist makes the case for the origin of our softest traits in the toughest challenges of survival. Read more...

Gomorra

A journalist's expose of Neapolitan organized crime is transformed into a cinematic portrayal of corrosive violence. Read more...

Logos

Bradford Cox's new record explores the splendors and sorrows of isolation. Read more...

February 11: Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day in 1990. The recent anthology Conversations with Myself samples from decades of archived material in an attempt to "give readers access to the Nelson Mandela…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.