Atlantic City. Ah, Atlantic City. Boardwalk Empire, in telling the unlikely story of Atlantic City’s rise from unpopulated sandy dunes to highly populated, brightly flashing casinos, tells a story that’s quite interesting, if you’re into the whole beach development/political corruption/materialistic greed sort of thing. It’s a story of graft, but with a nostalgic tilt. All […]

In Bad Comma, Louis Menand takes Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves) to task for her peculiar and highly idiosyncratic application of punctuation. The revelation of how wrong Truss is, by itself, is comical (at times), but it’s unfair to say that Menand writes about nothing else; the entire article is insightful, engaging […]

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is a fun romp by everybody’s favorite anthropologist, Marvin Harris. It looks at behavior that seems illogical to an outside observer—the sacred cow, the hated pig (and even the loved pig), the potlach, and so on—in an attempt to explain away the riddles. There are numerous chapters (as there are […]

I made a pretty valiant effort to read Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places. It seemed like a good idea at the time; a book about all the wonderful things of the 20th Century, what’s not to like? Movies, literature, philosophy, war… seriously, what’s not to like? And plus, it was on sale dirt-cheap at […]