“How did people sit in the Middle Ages?” It is a remarkable question—disarmingly simple yet potentially sweeping. A precocious child might pose something of the sort to a flustered parent—and the child minder in question would absently wave off the inquiry or simply ignore it.
Before September 11, 2001, the doctrine of habeas corpus—the principle that the state must explain why it’s hauled you off in leg shackles—was rarely the subject of legal dispute. Habeas cases were filed, and the writ was either granted or denied. But the claim that judges couldn’t hear such cases—that the government might detain great masses of people for years on end and without justification—wasn’t really open to debate. Habeas corpus is, after all, the only common-law doctrine enshrined in the Constitution. But after 9/11, the Bush administration began to round up foreigners, classify them as enemy combatants, and ship
It sounds like the setup for a joke: Don Juan, chased by a leather-clad couple on a motorcycle, somersaults over a fence and into the garden of a French country inn. He stays at the inn for seven days, regaling the innkeeper with tales of his travels and trysts. But this is no joke; it’s the beguiling narrative arc of Peter Handke’s peculiar new novel, Don Juan: His Own Version.
Theresa Longworth, a middle-class English girl fresh from a convent school, met William Charles Yelverton, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, on a boat crossing the English Channel in 1852. She was nineteen, and he was a decade older. They talked all night on the open deck and then began a correspondence lasting five years, during which time Longworth served as a nurse in the Crimea. Her letters, which the whole world would soon be invited to read, were not the sort that usually dripped from the quills of Victorian women: “I have made up my mind to turn savage,” she told Yelverton,
During the 2009 holiday shopping rush, a popular computer maker encountered an embarrassing problem—its vaunted facial-recognition program failed to register black faces. Much of the ensuing media discussion noted that such software was still in its infancy. It makes sense that computers would be confused about race. After all, their creators are often equally clueless.
His name may not ring a bell, but John Kiriakou was the CIA guy who surfaced on television during the furor over waterboarding to declare that, sure, it was torture, but it worked like magic on Al Qaeda kingpin Abu Zubaydah. According to Kiriakou, a long-time veteran of the agency’s intelligence-analysis and operations directorates, Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou told ABC-TV’s Brian Ross in an exclusive interview on December 10, 2007. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens
Fresh from having resigned his pulpit in the Second Unitarian Church, and after briefly considering becoming a botanist, Ralph Waldo Emerson decided to try his hand at philosophy. His 1836 pamphlet, Nature, contains a theory of history, an ethics, a philosophy of language, and an aesthetics. The system, if we can call it that, is a sort of Orphic pantheism. Among its teachings are that nature is a hieroglyph of our minds, that there exists an “occult relation between man and the vegetable,” and that we “expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” The book hits
The history of independent bookstores is littered with fallen monuments. Manhattan’s Eighth Street Bookshop counted the Beats and Auden as customers, but it was long gone when I moved to New York in 1992. In the past several years, we’ve lost the wonderful Dutton’s in Los Angeles; the Trover Shop, once an institution on Capitol Hill; and Cody’s in Berkeley (since when aren’t even that city’s good leftist citizens able to keep an independent bookstore open?). There is something inherently ephemeral about the trade, and the obstacles—indifferent publics, high rents, minuscule profit margins—are too many to list. It’s not just
In the run-up to the housing collapse of 2007–2008, houses weren’t merely expensive, they were insanely expensive. Yet just when it seemed that prices couldn’t go higher, some fool would come along and pay an enormous sum for a glorified hovel. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that American real estate was overvalued. It did, however, take something special to figure out how to make money off the madness. A group of between ten and twenty people did just that, making the bet of a lifetime that author Michael Lewis calls “The Big Short.”
Laura Trombley’s Mark Twain’s Other Woman and Michael Shelden’s Mark Twain: Man in White are remarkably absent any close study of the literary works of Mark Twain, concerned as they are with the last decade or so in the life of a writer whose important books had been written very previously. Twain’s major project between 1900 and 1910 was the burnishing of his public image; as his every sneeze, utterance, and physical movement from one location to another was clocked for posterity by the world press, typically in banner headlines, the historically ill informed could easily conclude that the period
John McPhee works from the ground up. He gets interested in things that his readers are likely to know little about––like nuclear physics or the merchant marine––and then writes about them in as much detail as possible. You feel that you come out of a McPhee piece with new vocabularies swimming around in your head. When I was a child, my parents gave me an illustrated book called The Way Things Work; McPhee is that book’s grown-up equivalent.
Technology can take unexpected turns on the path from an inventor’s lab to the shelves of Best Buy. During World War II, presidents Roosevelt and Truman used a cutting-edge voice scrambler called the vocoder, dubbed SIGSALY by the US Signal Corps, to communicate furtively with the Allies about details for such operations as the Normandy invasion and the Hiroshima bombing. Two decades later, as President Kennedy used an encryption device for back-channel communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis, vocal scrambling began its second life in music as singers started distorting their voices. In Hamilton, Ohio, soul-funk musician Roger Troutman fabricated
Text occupies space. It creates a geography on the page by placing upon it characters in strings designed by the author. Many great writers are acutely aware of how the shape of their text affects the reading experience—think of the hermetic, no-paragraph-breaks style of Thomas Bernhard, or the postcard-like emanations of David Markson. This notion is certainly an active element in the work of John D’Agata. His first essay collection Halls of Fame is a panorama of fact and image, information delivered as a collage. Halls of Fame shifts between lyric essay and journalism as it considers subjects a diverse
A born rambler, Justine Kurland has been traveling across America with a camera for the past decade. In 2004, when her son, Casper, was born, she took him along for the ride. Their camping van soon became crammed with toy trains; Casper’s enthusiasm for locomotives was infectious, and Kurland’s work began to explore real railways, as well as the train hoppers and hobos she met along the way. Like any parent, she also frequently aimed her camera at her child, as he toddled through the blighted and bountiful landscape of America’s backwoods and slept in a cozy bed built into
At her father’s funeral, Siri Hustvedt delivered a tearless eulogy. Two and a half years later, while giving a talk at St. Olaf College in honor of her father’s work in the school’s Norwegian Department, she began to shudder violently from the neck down. Of the episode, she writes, “I hadn’t felt emotional. I had felt entirely calm and reasonable. Something seemed to have gone terribly wrong with me, but what exactly? I decided to go in search of the shaking woman.”
There are two species of religious sentiment, David Hume declared in 1741, writing in bleak Enlightenment Scotland as the American colonies endured the brushfire of a first great religious revival: the superstitious and the enthusiastic. It can be tempting today to see the secular liberalism of contemporary Europe—a creed besieged by enthusiasts Islamic fundamentalist, American interventionist, and homegrown Christian nationalist—as a variety of gloomy superstition. As Ian Buruma chronicles in his slight Taming the Gods, many of the most vocal defenders of that agnostic, ameliorative tradition make their case with the docent-like outlook of guardians of an heirloom culture facing
You may not be able to save time in a bottle, but surely it can be laid on the line. Beginning with fourth-century Christian theologian Eusebius’s Chronicle, the timeline has been a mainstay for historians eager to visualize the temporal. In Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton’s scholarly yet spirited account, we can see the church father’s “image of history” recast with increasing intricacy and decorative flourishes. If some intriguing examples require viewers to decipher minuscule type and thread through labyrinthine structures, the best are often the clearest—those comprehended almost instantly. The timeline, the authors note, comes naturally to us—we think
Smack in the middle of Jonathan Mahler’s best-selling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning there unfolds an unforgettable account of the 1977 New York City blackout. Personal narratives, drawn from interviews and documentary sources, of the politicians, technicians, looters, and police who experienced the blackout are all stitched together in Mahler’s accelerated and visceral montage. After this, any historian attempting to convey the same events must have a fair amount of chutzpah, but sadly, David Nye’s social history of blackouts, When the Lights Went Out, lacks the cinematic flair of Mahler’s narrative. Nye’s subject is broader, “not simply power
The title of critic David Levi Strauss’s new book, paired with his reputation for engaging political subjects, suggests From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual might be a fruitful addition to the recent spate of books that link craftsmanship to broader questions about economic worth. The best known of these are Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2008) and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), both of which draw on a tradition of moral criticism, inaugurated by John Ruskin and William Morris, that protests capitalism’s tendency to undervalue skilled labor. Being aesthetes, Sennett and Crawford pondered the special place
The public expression of contempt for professors is one of our cherished national pastimes and is that rare thing—bipartisan. We need a commander-in-chief, not a law professor, is a Sarah Palin applause line. Recently on its front page the New York Times invoked “the classic image of a humanities professor … tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular—and liberal” in a story on a sociological study of the power of typecasting.
