 A bi-weekly column from a promiscuous reader.
By Jessa Crispin |
In Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert Everybody trashes Elizabeth Gilbert. Me, I kind of like the idea of someone trying to figure out a way to be.
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| The Foreign Service Want to hear the nation's crickets all at once? Release Best European Fiction 2010 here.
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Filet of Soul 2009 was the year we realized money won't buy happiness. Will 2010 be the year we learn what can?
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Half and Half There's a battle between the brain's hemispheres. The winner is always changing, but the left is up right now.
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Monster Mash We've come to love the sea and be fascinated by outer space, but we just can't stop fearing monsters.
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Being There It's incredibly difficult to deal simultaneously with work we admire and the atrocities of the people behind it. Polanski and his films, Heidegger and his politics, Berlin and its past...
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Timing Is Everything With manufacturing slipping away, America needs something to export to the rest of the world. How's about our conception of time?
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Code Blue Death panels. Public options. Obesity. Organic. Why is no one talking about mental health care reform?
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Maugham's the Word? Somerset Maugham died in 1965. So why is he getting the TMZ treatment today?
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My Kind of Book Unlike almost every other American city, Chicago has no single defining storyline. So how do you write a history of it?
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Book 'Em Is there any more relatable criminal than the rare book thief?
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Digital Drama Can we move beyond the doom and gloom of new technology, please?
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| Central Booking Anyone can be a writer in the digital age, but how many people actually want to write?
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Town Crier Why is everyone so romantic about the American Small Town? Because nobody really knows what one is.
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Good Times We've long believed that to be kind was to be weak. Yet the value has its advantages...
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Beating Hearts The problem with love is that it's often an endpoint, and not a beginning. Enter A Vindication of Love.
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Medical Drama With violence back in the abortion debate, we reconsider the definitive history of the pro-life movement.
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| The Wages of Sin The old way at looking at sin was to avoid it at all costs. Now? Embracing sin is its own form of spiritual evolution.
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| Pill Poppers What triggers depression? One camp blames the culture, the other, the depressed themselves.
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Infinite Wisdom We think of math as fairly straightforward, but its history is tangled with mysticism and religion.
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Birth Rights Women can't fix everything, but empowering them sure helps. There is data on this.
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Middle Ground Need to feel some 'at-home-ness in the universe'? Scientists in the 19th century did, too.
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Body Snatchers I'd love it if people felt better about their looks, but I'm not sold on the whole body-fluids-as-perfume thing.
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Mind Games College offers excellent exposure to philosophy. A Beginner's Guide to Philosophy does not.
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Trog Want Book!!! Human evolution is amazing, but maybe we need a bit more to handle planes, subways, and modern life in general.
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Well, Are You Happy Now? Simple directions work for IKEA furniture and onion-soup dips. Happiness (thankfully) is a bit more complex.
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Cult Classic It's easy to sensationalize what happened at Jonestown. The hard part is figuring out how it happened.
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Quitting Time Addiction memoirs are like opinions on how to cure addiction: Everybody's got one.
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Home Alone Who'd guess that a homemaking guide from 2008 would have a narrower world view than one from 1861?
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Help Wanted I really want self-help books to work, but there are only so many affirmations I can write on my mirror.
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Let's Talk About Sex We have come to think of gender as a spectrum. Is it time to do the same for sex?
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Bewitched Witch hunts are grouped with other mass killings, but it was the only widespread execution of an entire gender.
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Frankfurter Were publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair worried about the industry? I don't know — they seemed more concerned with booze and sex.
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Porn Maze Porn has many critics. Their days, however, are numbered.
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God's Words Why does everyone who's had a spiritual experience feel the need to write about it?
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Bedtime Story Nobody knows why we sleep; it's unsurprising, then, that Insomniac can't say why we don't.
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Marrying Type The American wedding is a superficial pageant, but so are the books that attempt to expose it.
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Only the Lonely Anti-loneliness advice may be treacly, but it beats the circle of hell that is feeling all alone in the world.
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Safety First What we can learn from 1940s sex-ed classes.
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The Bio Sphere We're in a period of biography overkill, with the James family its latest victims.
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Pillow Talk Who ever thought sex memoirs could be so boring?
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War Stories For those who've lived in war zones — from Afghanistan to Ireland — memoir can be a powerful exorcism.
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Women's Studies There are how-to guides, and then there are how-to guides for women. Why the distinction?
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Fully Booked The brain did not evolve to develop a written language. But learning to read will not change you; it's what and how you read that will.
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Man Overboard In blaming TV, booze, and pornography, books like the The Broken American Male miss the mark.
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Veg Out It's fine that vegans don't want to eat meat. But do their cookbook recipes have to taste so bad?
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The Forest and the Trees Americans are ambivalent about nature, but that doesn't meant all nature writing has to be depressing.
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The Depression Book Blues Against Happiness, Eric Wilson's defense of melancholia, is just...sad.
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How to Shop Women need to be told what to wear. At least that's what the glut of fashion guides suggests.
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The Second Sex, the Second Time The Second Sex? You know, that thing you were supposed to read in your Women’s Studies class? Considering de Beauvoir in a self-help age.
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Atheism Is the New Black Have books on atheism already jumped the shark? A new response by theologian John F. Haught suggests both sides have it all wrong.
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