Omnivore
American cities
City Planning 101: Why universities became big-time real estate developers. Welcome to an American city where the government barely exists. When New York City almost failed: Claire Potter interviews Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics (and more). Can cities make us better citizens? Justin McGuirk reviews Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett. Dense urbanism is great for downtowns, but what about suburbs?
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Paper Trail
Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming sold more than 725,000 units on November 13, the day of its release. This is the biggest release-day sales total for any book published in the US in 2018. Maya Jasanoff, the author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, has won the 2018 Cundill History Prize. Ann …Syllabi
Outrageous Clarity: The Fictions of Amélie Nothomb
Charlotte ShaneWith Amélie Nothomb’s latest, Strike Your Heart, the Francophone author of twenty-five books seems to have finally found some of the American attention she deserves. (I’m basing this assessment in part …- The Roots of the Alt-right Mike Wendling
- Marriage Reimagined Laura Smith
Daily Review
Seasonal Associate
Heike Geissler, the German novelist and translator, ran out of money in the winter of 2010 and took a temporary job at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig to support her two children. As she tells us in the opening pages of her book about that experience, she was not intending … 
Interviews
Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman is a native New Yorker, an activist, and, although I'm not sure she would apply the label to herself, a profound philosopher on social relations and blame, All of these streams flow into her recent novel Maggie Terry, a literary detective story about a former NYPD officer struggling with addiction, a tough case, and her ex-partner's theft of her daughter, In a compressed time frame of a few days, Maggie, fresh out of rehab, both loses and finds her place in the new New York.
…- Heike Geissler, the German novelist and translator, ran out of money in the winter of …
- NO WORKING WRITER believes in the shattering power of an encounter—with another person, …
- The cover of the catalogue for Vija Celmins’s recent exhibitions at Matthew Marks …
- I've spent the past few days unpacking my library. My books are finally on the shelves, …
- In his visionary 1985 essay “Exactitude,” the Italian writer Italo Calvino says, “The …
- Two Southern belles on the run get catcalled one too many times by the same schlubby …
- On March 6, 2015, just before International Women’s Day, authorities in cities around …
- For decades, the forbidding bulk of the 808-page hardcover edition of Witness ( …
- The usual thing, in book reviewing, is to start with the positive. Polite book reviewers …
- The tragedy of the formative opening episode in Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, is an …
Reviews
Excerpt
Extralife
Jessica Hopper
Saturday was the Hold Steady video. It is a good thing not all one hundred people showed up because we had room for about thirty-three total. People later said they did not show because filming video is waiting around for twenty hours to act fake-excited in one-minute spurts.
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