In 1999, Woodstock’s thirtieth-anniversary festival ended in a wave of sexual assaults, rioting, and fires—an unlikely celebration of the original Woodstock’s “three days of peace and music.” The breed of angry male bands that dominated the festival and the airwaves that year with juvenile sexist resentment (as summed up by Limp Bizkit’s summer hit, “Nookie”) was a reminder that rock’s rebellion is often unfriendly to women. After Limp Bizkit’s inane and sloppy set (during which a gang rape allegedly occurred in the crowd), Rage Against the Machine, a precise and polished band—perhaps the most

It’s almost impossible to write a book about our nation’s energy crisis that arouses in the reader any more excitement than what’s delivered in a maximum-strength barbiturate. I know this because I recently published one such book and found myself going out of my way, in my reporting rounds, to pursue the most extreme kind of high jinks—choppering out to ultra-deep oil rigs, spelunking into the Manhattan electric grid, even infiltrating a boob-job operation—all in the service of sustaining reader interest. While Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology may sound like a

Ancient egypt has been misunderstood since Herodotus put pen to papyrus in the fifth century B.C., though its appeal has never flagged. Exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts still draw large crowds at museums, and the "documentaries" on cable channels continue to flood in. But much of this attention feeds into an idea that Egypt is "other" and "exotic"—a changeless, mysterious world of tombs, temples and sorcerers. Hollywood is guilty of promoting this image, but so are scholars, who are prone to emphasize mummies and royal tombs to the exclusion of topics such as agricultural production, social

I haven't had sex since starting Deborah Lutz's book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. Now that I've finished, I'm still in recovery. It's only fair, you say, to look for other causes, but, I'm sorry, the correlation is too strong. These interwoven tales of Victorian high jinks include some piquant stories: Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his poems from his wife's grave, Algernon Swinburne scurrying off to be "birched" by prostitutes near Regent's Park, Richard Burton (the explorer) trying to wake the British out of their sexless sleep. But there's a problem.

This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers. It is written by well-regarded professors (one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it.

“Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct, and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who rendered this verdict, knew full well that these were not the first adjectives that would spring to most people’s minds to describe Amedeo Modigliani.