Back in the closing years of the last century, Jon Lee Anderson, who currently writes lucid and useful dispatches from the world’s hotspots—current and future—for the New Yorker, hied himself and his young family to Havana and wrote what is currently the definitive biography of Ernesto Che
My sense of the fin-de-siècle years in American pop culture and the decades leading up to them is that the reactionary ‘70s were followed by an era of escalating exuberance—one barometer of that was the burgeoning importance of design and designers, in fashion, interiors, and consumer goods.
Mike Deri Smith summarizes recent news, studies, and gaffes concerning overconfidence, from competitive running to the N.F.L. draft, even socialist firemen.
R.I.P. Leslie Buck, designer of New York's iconic coffee cup. Damascus gets a smoking ban, redefining café society. Pictures: Gaza's bodybuilding contest, for men's eyes only. Boy Scouts of America fighting to keep files on suspected child molesters private. Map of Europe
There is something odd about a quintessentially American book having been written by a Frenchman, an oddity perhaps compounded by being one of the most unread well-known titles in American history. Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume Discovery of America, published in 1835 and 1840 after the young Frenchman’
As I write this, the honorable literary organization PEN is holding its Sixth Annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is a thing of wonder and joy if you are proximal to the universal center of ambition (or are inclined to transport yourself there) and you are a devotee
Iowa G.O.P. hopeful calls for tracking illegal immigrants with microchip implants. The movement to boycott AriZona Tea is futile--the drink is brewed in Long Island. At "Vending Spree," TMN's Matthew Baldwin will consume and review every item in his office's vending
As we carve out weekends for summer vacations and welcome loved ones home from across the volcanic ash-strewn pond, our staff and readers share their hard-earned trip advice.
New oil leak discovered off Louisiana coast; rate now 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000. Stabber injures 28 children in China--third such knife attack in a month. Eight opinions on who should replace Justice Stevens. "Black elephant"--a widely predicted event that people will claim
The assassination-history business in the U.S., while not a thriving enterprise, does provide an occasional narrative from a decidedly warped point of view—though of the successful presidential assassinations, only John Willkes Booth’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s have spurred countless treatises and analyses. In the main
