Lip Service

Smile, and the whole world smiles with you. But they don't all necessarily mean the same thing. Marianne LaFrance convinces us there's a secret wealth concealed behind that most common of facial expressions. Drawing from the allied fields of medicine, biology, psychology and anthropology, with a dash of computer science, LaFrance dissects the smile into its component parts and reassembles them into a potent force for both transparency and chicanery, friendship and enmity.

May 24: Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published on this day in 1951. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, putting her in a rank…

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's…

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