Here’s a cultural artifact of the minor sort: Issue Number 82 (July 1957) of Authentic Science Fiction, a monthly magazine of stories in that genre, 128 pages, sparsely ...

A prosperous, roly-poly Greek with a name that sounds like an Aztec root vegetable once proclaimed that if you have a brain, A cannot be both A and not A. Some twenty-one ...

Downton Abbey"€˜s popularity in the United States comes as little shock to those who remember the early 1970s"€™ Upstairs, Downstairs craze. In a word, the show's popularity ...

Admittedly it is déclassé to kick someone when they"€™re down and even more so when they"€™re dead. Yet with recent hagiographies of Whitney Houston by well-intended but ...

The de Kooning show just closed at MoMA, and I just finished reading The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel ...

On New Year’s Day, NBC honking head Andrea Mitchell tried making America hip to the Hawkeye State’s unforgivable lack of hipness: The rap on Iowa: it doesn’t represent ...

This year crawls toward its doom while 2012 waits to unleash new horrors upon us. Here in California, we enjoyed the first year of rule by our resuscitated governor, who has ...

Right as fashion photographer Mario Testino was about to announce the winner of this year’s coveted Turner Prize, a beefy brute in a pink tutu and sensible black socks ...

In Miami Beach on Monday morning, the convention center was strewn with cardboard, Scotch Tape, Styrofoam peanuts, and other packing litter. The hotel bars were littered with ...

I’ve read few things more depressing than this GQ piece about the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas earlier this year. On March 8 The New York Times had ...

In most of its manifestations, the detective story is a modern morality tale with the heroes of good battling the forces of evil. The detective story is the conservative literary ...

The title of this piece is both offensive and untrue, which has not dissuaded Hollywood from making a feature film based on this very premise. In the almost forty years since his ...

If you’re going to do something as extreme, impetuous, and possibly ill-considered as setting yourself on fire, it would at least make sense to do it in the name of some higher ...

I lived in Taiwan for four months in the early 90s and have since spent a fair amount of time on China’s mainland, so I can ask this question without being accused of prejudice: ...

Last week, Italy’s version of Wikipedia cloaked itself in advance of wiretapping laws they say may force them to delete the site entirely. If you’re like me, you immediately ...

The desperately blue-balled men in the remote jungle village of Barbacoas, Colombia, can breathe a collective sigh of relief—a 112-day “sex strike” that local women had ...