It all began with the Los Angeles kimchi taco truck. Rumors of this previously unimaginable and yet obviously brilliant invention began to float into our Brooklyn home from the West Coast sometime in 2009. My husband, a native Angeleno—and thus a taco snob—as well as a kimchi fanatic, immediately began trying to find a reason to fly out to the City of Angels as soon as possible. Surely there was a conference, a wedding, some critical gathering that would put him in close proximity to this ideal mash-up of two of his favorite food groups (unlike me and no doubt many other people, he counts

ExxonMobil, the worlds’s biggest and most profitable corporation, is used to being viewed as the bad guy. Every time recession-strapped Americans face new spikes in the cost of gas, the oil giant’s profits ratchet up even more. In 2008, record-high gasoline prices were the direct driver of ExxonMobil’s forty-five billion dollars in profit, the largest total in corporate history.

The company also occupies an outsize role in the nation’s politics—as you’d expect would be the case for any firm booking profits in the mid-eleven-figure range. Since 1998, ExxonMobil has pumped $9.4 million into

If anybody asked me, particularly in a plaintive tone of desperation, for a comprehensive backgrounder on the uprisings that have convulsed much of the Arab world since December 2010, I’d have no hesitation in pointing them to The Battle for the Arab Spring. Lin Noueihed, a Reuters editor, and Alex Warren, a consultancy expert, have joined forces to produce a remarkably far-reaching and exceptionally precise summary of the uprisings generally, but unfortunately, referred to as the “Arab Spring.” Particularly for the uninitiated or those seeking a synoptic but relatively detailed account of what

In his manual for a better (or, at least, for his own) life, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, self-help guru and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss outlines his secrets to a productive and wealthy life. One of the book’s central tenets is to “outsource everything.” Ferriss suggests we hire a series of concierges to triage our correspondences, arrange travel and restaurant reservations, contact old friends, and handle routine support tasks in our lives. Ferriss contracts with concierge companies in India to handle much of his data flow. He suggests

IN THE TWENTY-TWO YEARS between the day the 1923 Kanto earthquake razed Tokyo and the months in which American bombers demolished it anew, modernity arrived in Japan. Ushered in by the creeping popularity of Western fashions, the rise of mass communication and transit, and the Europeanizing of urban public life, the “brittle years” of the early 1930s marked an uneasy encounter between Japanese traditionalism and Western cosmopolitanism, and nowhere did the attendant anxieties play out more than in the modan garu—Japan’s “modern girl.” The equivalent of the ’20s-era flapper, modan garus dressed

“Originally I intended to write a book about Harpo’s relation to history and literature,” remarks Wayne Koestenbaum on the first page of his fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering study of the great mime of Marx Brothers fame. “A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Stein. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hitler.” That idea didn’t stick. Plan B, we are told, was a novella, The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx: “The narrator, Harpo, was a queer Jewish masseur who lived in Variety Springs, New York, and whose grandparents had starred in vaudeville

Hali Felt’s quite wonderful new book disqualifies itself as a true biography for a reason that will jar any reader who feels protective of the traditional rules of nonfiction writing. Simply put, parts of it are fictional. There are several key moments in this absorbing account of the life and career of marine cartographer Marie Tharp when Felt, a first-time book author with a flowing and vivid prose style, invents scenes to fill out otherwise sizable gaps in Tharp’s life story: “I want to give [Marie’s] story a little palpable emotion, even if it isn’t hers, to try to keep her whole, a little