Books

Cyberspace” is where old footage — and old ignorant prejudice — lives forever. The term made its fictional debut in a monologue by the disgraced hacker hero of William Gibson’s…

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In the year 564 b.c., a pankratiast named Arrichion stepped into the ring at the Olympic games. Pankration was a nasty mélange of wrestling and boxing, very popular with the…

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The horseman among myrtles, the four horns and four carpenters, the measuring line, the candlestick and two olive trees, the flying scroll, the women and the ephah, the four chariots:…

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When five brightly balaclava’d members of the Pussy Riot collective climbed atop the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012 to chant “Our Lady, Chase Putin…

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First, collect all the details you can on all the people you encounter — this will turn them into “characters.” Second, search this trove for the most interesting connections among the…

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Last fall, the Man Booker Prize, the premier award for fiction in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, announced that it was coming to America. Presumably Edward St. Aubyn had already…

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John Florio — lexicographer, raconteur, and supposed model for Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Holofernes, in Love’s Labour’s Lost — was born in London in 1553 to an unidentified Englishwoman and an Italian Protestant who’d…

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It is inevitable that some readers will take from Evelyn Barish’s biography of the life and misdeeds of Paul de Man the notion that literary theory is a crock. The title…

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Tracing an original edition of Solomon Northup’s narrative to a slaveholder

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