Harvard has acquired Norman Mailer’s mistress’s papers, including two unpublished manuscripts with scenes describing their intimate encounters. I kid you not. Read a tasteful overview here…. Read more...
My husband, Mark Trainer, has a story in the WaPo today. It’s called “Odd Man Out: A Stay-at-Home Dad Wonders What Comes Next,” and you should read it. UPDATE, 4/23: Mark’s story generated a lot of letters and emails, mostly very thoughtful. The Post ran some this week…. Read more...
That’s the headline that the Washington Post gave my review of Dee Dee Myers’s new book, Why Women Should Rule the World. Myers, as you may recall, was Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, and the first woman in the job. I’m not sure where the wisdom lies—I found very little in the book—but there surely was pain in the reviewing of it. Books like this set feminism back a good decade. Here’s my lead: “If women truly want to rule the world, they will stop writing books with titles like Why Women Should Rule the World.”… Read more...
In the N.B. column of its April 4 issue, the Times Literary Supplement discusses my recent article about a dustup among Coleridge scholars. (The controversy turns on claims that Coleridge anonymously translated Goethe’s Faust; Oxford University Press recently published the text in question as Faustus, From the German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick.) The column isn’t online, as far as I can tell, but here’s an excerpt: Howard describes the title OUP gave the book as “provocatively definitive,” and claims that the debate “has pitted old acquaintances against each other”… Read more...
Some other people did too. My former employer, The Washington Post, really cleaned up this time around. I remember a speech that Len Downie made to the newsroom a few years back—one of the years when the paper nabbed no Pulitzers—in which he said, “We are not defined by the prizes we win.” Or don’t win…. Read more...
The Library of Congress defends its commitment to scholarship and research in a statement posted today on its website. This comes after scholars protested the Library’s decision to boot the European Reading Room out of its current space to make room for an Abraham Lincoln exhibition. Read the Chronicle’s news-blog coverage here…. Read more...
