“The history of bookmaking hasn’t been without its challenges, but never was its craft as painstaking as during the era of illuminated manuscripts,” says Maria Popova. Well, try laying out an ebook that has art in it. But Popova makes a good case in a…
The re-launched Baffler — back from the dead under editor John Summers — carries a 10-page takedown of The Atlantic by Maureen Tkacik. The piece (“Omniscient Gentleman of The Atlantic,” not available online) focuses on changes at the venerable magazine under owner David G. Bradley, who bought The Atlantic…
The English historian Ronald Fraser has died. He was the author of a number of books on Spanish history including In Search of a Past and In Hiding, which Arthur Miller reviewed in the New York Times, calling it “So brief and yet so complete, so…
At Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson argues that there have been no radical change in style, culture, art, and fashion over the last 20 years—a stark contrast to every other two decade period. Going all the back into the 19th-century, Anderson writes, a 20 year period marked…
Two weeks ago, André Schiffrin, founder of The New Press, the former publisher of Pantheon Books, and the author of our A Political Eduction, was awarded the Chevalier in the Order of the Legion of Honor of France. Below is the award address given by…
In his new novel, 11/22/63, Stephen King “employs a time traveler to interview Lee Harvey Oswald’s mysterious associate George De Mohrenschildt since he died of shotgun blast to his head on March 29, 1977,” writes investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, but “a time-traveling avatar is…
“Of all the murders committed in New York City in 1964 — 636, to be precise — only that of Catherine Susan Genovese launched a whole subfield of social science: There had to be an explanation for why 38 people could see the 28-year-old barkeep…
In what can only be called an incredible feat of conservation technology, a 1,000 year old text by Archimedes is now on view at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. “The exhibition, ‘Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes,’ which opened Sunday, tells the story…
A profile of Hendrik Hertzberg in Current Biography tells the tale of how the famed essayist came to the New Yorker. Like many New Yorker stories, the tale begins at the Harvard Crimson, where Hertzberg was managing editor. He … … got a phone call…
A fund-raiser for the Sandy Museum, in Sandy, Utah turned up something thoroughly unexpected. According to a Fox 13 report, a man brought in a book that turned out to be a 1494 copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a companion to the Guttenberg Bible and…
