Nov. 10, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A
"field study" from the Association of Research Libraries looks at what it calls the "unexplored ecosystem" of digital publishing.
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Nov. 7, 2008, The Chronicle Review
A new edition of
Frankenstein strips out Percy Shelley's edits and restores Mary Shelley's original language.
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Oct. 10, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education"
A European push to rank humanities journals has many humanists worried--and it's not just a European phenomenon.
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Sept. 12, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Should federally funded research be made freely accessible to the public after it's published? The House Subcommitte on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property heard testimony pro and con last week at a hearing on H.R. 6845, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would, among other things, threaten the NIH's current public-access policy.
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Sept./Oct.Nov. 2008, Bookforum
Tim Butcher, a journalist for the Telegraph, set out to retrace Stanley's 1874-1877 journey across the Congo. Was it a brave or stupid thing to do, and what did he find? How far have we come since the days of the "Scramble for Africa"? I reviewed Butcher's account of the trip,
Blood River, for the Sept./Oct./Nov. issue of Bookforum, which is now online.
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Sept. 4, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Aug. 26, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A
report just released by the Ithaka group shows "a mismatch of perception" between librarians and faculty members when it comes tthe importance of libraries' traditional role as a gateway to scholarly information. Ithaka used data from surveys conducted in 2006, so this report is slightly out of date, but the trends it picked up on only appear to be accelerating.
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Aug. 15, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The publisher of the Arden Shakespeare has cancelled the contract of a senior scholar charged with producing a new edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the well-regarded series. Patricia Parker, who has a high reputation among Shakespearians, had been working on her edition of MND for more than a decade. Did Arden's publisher, Cengage, terminate her because of missed deadlines? Or was something else--commercialism versus scholarship, or scholar versus scholar--behind the dismissal?
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Aug. 1, 2008, The Chronicle Review
A look at two nifty new digital-humanities projects: The Map of Early Modern London, created by Janelle Jenstad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria, and a Google Earth visualization of the development of Irish-American literature. That one's the brainchild of Matthew Jockers, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University. Neat stuff.
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July 28, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The 2007 annual report of the Andrew W. Mellon has some surprisingly intriguing things to say about the past, present, and future of scholarly communication.
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June 30, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A report from the annual gathering of the Association of American University Presses, June 26-29, in Montreal.
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June 25, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Recent libel actions involving U.S. authors and the British legal system make it clear just how wide a gulf separates the United States from the rest of the world on the question of free speech.
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June 18, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The College Art Association has decided not to fight a threatened libel action in British court. The case concerned a review in the Fall 2007 issue of its flagship publication, Art Journal, by Columbia University professor Joseph Massad. The association has asked its institutional subscribers to withdraw the offending portions of the review. Was it right to do so?
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June 18, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The University of Michigan Press has decided to end relationship with Pluto Press, a small, London-based publisher with a self-described radical agenda. The relationship caused Michigan some grief last year when one of Pluto's books,
Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel, became the target of protests by pro-Israel groups.
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May 23, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A report on John Updike's Jefferson Lecture, delivered here in DC at the Warner Theatre on May 22. The Jefferson Lecture is sponsored by the NEH and is the federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."
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May 16, 2008, The Chronicle Review
This month, Yale University Press published a new translation of Virgil's martial epic by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. Her edition appears to be the first by a woman. And she's not alone: There have been four new translations in the past three years, with at least two more in the works. Why the
Aeneid, and why now?
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May 7, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The
Open Humanities Press has the backing of some heavy-hitting humanists, including Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Badiou.
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May 2, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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April 13, 2008, The Washington Post
My Washington Post review of
Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to hold the job of White House press secretary.
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April 4, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
While the Ithaka group was preparing its 2007 report on "University Publishing in a Digital Age," the University of California was taking matters into its own hands with a look at home-grown publishing activity on its 10 campuses. You can find the report
here.
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March 26, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Goodby, research--hello, tourism! Or so scholars fear.
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March 28, 2008, The Chronicle Review
Romanticists debate whether Coleridge was the anonymous hand behind an 1821 translation of Goethe's
Faustus.
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Feb. 26, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Gutenberg-e, the high-profile digital history monograph series published by Columbia University Press in collaboration with the American Historical Association, has gone open access. The monographs are also available, with some enhancements (related historiography etc.), through the Humanities E-Book project run by the American Council of Learned Societies.
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Feb. 8, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A special issue of the Journal of American History gives scholars a chance to think historically about a catastrophic recent event--the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. It's an interesting example of what some call "the search for a usable past." The journal's editors also
created a website that expands on the print edition as well as linking to lots of other Katrina-related material.
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Jan. 31, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
New guidelines for undergraduate creative-writing instruction promote the very sensible idea that to be an expert writer, you first have to learn to be an expert reader.
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Feb. 1, 2008, The Chronicle Review (subscription only)
The social psychologist Carol Gilligan made a splash 26 years ago with
In a Different Voice, which took developmental psychology to task for its insistence that male experience defined human experience. Now she's written a novel,
Kyra. Why?
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Jan. 21, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The Library of Congress is the mother ship of U.S. libraries. Has it shouldered too much of the cataloguing burden? What's the best use of finite library resources? This report has some suggestions. I co-wrote this article with my Chronicle colleague Andrea Foster.
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Jan. 11, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Not a story for everybody, but if you follow academic literary fashions you might find it intriguing. Posthuman is all the rage--but SF folks have known that for a long time.
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Dec. 21, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Who gets to decide what goes in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and what other choices do Brit-lit-survey instructors have? Do we still need anthologies anyway--and do students even know how to use them? I talked to editors and classroom types to get some answers.
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Nov. 20, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A schism of Biblical proportions.
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Nov. 19, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The National Endowment for the Arts declares reading dead (again).
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Nov. 14, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
But the news is not all good, especially if you compare the new numbers to language-enrollment rates from 40 years ago.
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Nov. 8, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Some wonder if this means that the University of Texas no longer cares about its own state's history.
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Oct. 26, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare maven and founder of New Historicism, is teaching a nifty new course at Harvard that uses 21st-century technology to take students on a voyage through the world Shakespeare knew--although it doesn't stop there.
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Oct. 11, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
I especially love the story about a member of the Nobel Committee telling her why she'd never win.
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Sept. 27, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Scholarly society reverses trend, ditches commercial publisher for a university press.
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Sept. 11, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
PRISM, an anti-open-access lobbying effort backed by the Association of American Publishers, riles some of the APA's members as well as OA advocates. More
here and
here.
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Sept. 14, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Folklorists lend a helping hand via "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston," a Texas-based project that trains hurricane survivors to collect the stories of fellow survivors.
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Aug. 30, 2007, Slate
Backpacks for junior scholars put to the test.
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Aug. 27, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Norman Finkelstein v. DePaul University, continued.
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Aug. 5, 2007, The Washington Post
In which I review Wendy Shalit's new book,
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad To Be Good, and find it an exercise in alarmism and dubious sociology. Watch out, girls, for cheap sex, bought with cheap clothes and cheaper liquor, at the price of self-respect and the prospect of any serious romance.
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July 24, 2007, Slate
Kiddie pools your children will adore.
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Aug. 3, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The just-issued Ithaka Report will transform scholarly publishing as we know it. Or it won't. Your call.
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July 20, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The aftermath of that Mellon RFP mentioned in the previous entry.
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June 29, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Drama! Gossip! A request for proposals from the Mellon Foundation! Actually, this convention was a lot of fun.
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June 22, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A new book by scholar Sharon Marcus maps out the surprisingly complex emotional landscape inhabited by Victorian women.
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May 25, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
There's been a spate of stories like this lately.
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May 4, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Digging up the truth about the first permanent English colony in America.
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April 5, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Alan Dershowitz doesn't want rival scholar Norman Finkelstein to get tenure at DePaul University, and he has a dossier to prove it. That makes some people, including many DePaul faculty, uncomfortable, to say the least.
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March 11, 2007, The Washington Post
A review of Nalo Hopkinson's
The New Moon's Arms, in which hot flashes really are power surges, Caribbean-style.
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March 9, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Historian Timothy Naftali will lead the Nixon Library into the federal system of presidential librarians. But can he convince skeptical scholars that he'll be able to turn a private shrine into a genuinely public archive?
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March 2, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
President Bush, are you listening?
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Feb. 9, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The steel-drivin' man raced a steam drill and died with his hammer in his hand. So the ballads say. Did he really exist? A historian thinks he may have found the flesh-and-blood man behind the legend.
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Jan. 5, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
University presses approve of the recently released report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Death to the tyranny of the monograph!
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Nov. 10, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Should you really need permission to interview Grandma? At some universities, oral historians can't turn on a microphone without clearance from the local IRB (Institutional Review Board).
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November 2006, Parenting magazine
How to prevent meltdowns and help your child control his emotions. With advice from the experts (not me--are you kidding?). I took this assignment hoping I would learn something useful, and I did. Not that it shows.
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Oct. 12, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
For once, the favorite wins.
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Oct. 6, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Publishers discover that it's getting easier to be green--and high time, too. Go, Green Press Initiative!
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Oct. 5, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
In its fall 2006 issue, VQR published "War Thoughts From Home," a just-discovered poem by Robert Frost. VQR's editor described the find as "staggering." Was it? Maybe not so much.
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Sept. 29, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
In a new book,
By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis, rival scholars dabate whether the explorer killed himself or fell victim to foul play. Here's a Q&A with a partisan of the murder-most-foul camp.
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Sept. 29, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (temporary link)
The Chicago Manual of Style turns 100 this fall. To celebrate, it's going where the party is--online.
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Sept. 22, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A Q&A with Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who's going public in a big way with his "heterodox views" on American identity and inequality in his new book,
The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.
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Sept. 10, 2006, The Washington Post
A review of
Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart. How to ruin your child by trying too hard to develop his or her talents. As if parenting wasn't already hard enough. What I don't say in the review, and what Quart fails to address in her book, is that there are plenty of parents out there who can't even be bothered to read to their offspring, much less encourage them to be concert pianists or math whizzes. Still, you might want to think twice before you park the tot in front of a so-called developmental video.
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Aug. 4, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Art-history scholars face narrowing publishing venues and rising permissions costs. But a report signals that help is on the way. Check out, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's proposed scholars' license program.
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July 14, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
James Miller, the editor of
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, learned abruptly that he will lose that job as of August 2008. What does it all mean?
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July 7, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The Gutenberg-e project at Columbia University set out to bring historical monographs into the brave new digital world. Six years in, how's it doing?
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June 19, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Tech talk, copyright jitters, and anti-FEMA tee-shirts at this year's Association of American University Press conference in New Orleans.
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May 28, 2006, The Washington Post
The author of
Like Water for Chocolate returns with a novel about the woman who translated for Cortes during his conquistadorial rampage through Mexico. Great subject, right? You'd think.
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May 12, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
If you didn't get to Dublin to raise a celebratory pint in honor of Samuel Beckett's centennial in April, you can visit an online exhibition of his work--or just read about it here, along with a description of the fantabulous doodles he liked to do. My new motto, courtesy of SB: "Nothing left. All used up. What's your deadline?"
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April 28, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
10 years ago, a young female scholar had trouble being taken seriously when she wanted to study Hemingway. Now Papa's hot again.
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April 14, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Is this what the future of scholarly publishing looks like? Perfect for cash-strapped librarians and scholars overwhelmed by material, Oxford Scholarship Online offers subscribers access to a browsable database of more than 1,000 OUP titles in philosophy, religion, economics, and finance.
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March 24, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
No more Leave It to Beaverland: A new wave of scholars challenges common assumptions about sprawl and urban growth.
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March 10, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Theodor Adorno said it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. In a Michigan Quarterly Review symposium, several writers and critics--including Jay Ladin, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Marjorie Perloff--take up Adorno's challenge. Not a topic for the faint of heart.
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Feb. 17, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
How new technology, paired with good old-fashioned textual scholarship, is reshaping what we know about Herman Melville. Among other discoveries: He entertained the idea of having Capt. Ahab kill off Moby-Dick at the end of the book.
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Feb. 17, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
What Herman Melville has in common with James Frey: His first, best-selling book might not be quite the "unvarnished truth" he claimed it was. New archaeological and ethnographic evidence takes issue with some facts in Melville's 1846 debut,
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.
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Feb. 3, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
University presses discover the civic and monetary rewards of keeping it local, in print and online.
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Jan. 2006, AARP Magazine online
Lighter fare, in every sense.
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Jan. 6, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The game's afoot (again). Thanks to Stanford's "Discovering Sherlock Holmes" project, readers can sign up to receive several Sherlock Holmes stories in weekly installments that are facsimilies of the original Strand magazine versions.
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Dec. 25, 2005, The Washington Post
In Ana Castillo's novel
Watercolor Women/Opaque Men, the life of a Chicana single mom could be verse. It could also be better.
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Dec. 16, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Is Theory with a capital T dead or more alive than ever? I asked some literature professors. Here's what they said.
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Nov. 11, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Alabama writer Brad Vice "borrowed" chunks of Carl Carmer's 1934 book
Stars Fell on Alabama for his story collection,
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, only he failed to cite his (copyrighted) source. Was it naivete, literary homage or plagiarism?
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Nov. 4, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
If aliens aren't really abducting earthlings, why do so many people have such vivid memories of close encounters? A psychiatric researcher investigates.
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Oct. 28, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Why are there so darn many, anyway, and what good are they? A Q&A with the author of
The Economy of Prestige.
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Oct. 21, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
It's not always bad to write in your books. Hey, it worked for Coleridge, Keats and Blake. What marginalia can tell us about "the reading mind."
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Oct. 13, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
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Sept. 19, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
A Q&A with Lee Clarke, author of
Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, who explains why playing the odds isn't a good bet when it comes to disasters.
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Sept. 9, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Did the author of "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano...," one of the 18th century's seminal slave narratives, fabricate his experience of life in Africa and the Middle Passage? U-MD English professor Vincent Carretta thinks maybe so, and others aren't so happy about it.
Read a transcript of an online chat with Carretta.
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Aug. 5, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
When a writer goes silent, is he or she still producing a readable text? (Subscription required).
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July 19, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education, reprinted in Znet.com
A new book that attacks Alan Dershowitz will see print despite the threat of legal action from the Harvard prof.
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July 8, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
How to say rude things about politicians and get away with it--in 17th-century England, anyway. (Subscription required; I'll post a copy of the article soon, but in the meantime you can read a longish excerpt
here at the History News Network.)
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July 1, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
At this year's confab of university presses, the Google Library project was hotly debated and the environmental and social costs of printing in China were not. (Subscription required).
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March 16, 2005, The Washington Post
In which I revisit my old grad-school stomping grounds and its second-hand literary attractions.
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Feb. 11, 2005, The Washington Post
Former Del Fuegos lead singer turns Pete Seeger for the new millennium--and still rocks.
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Dec./Jan. 2004-'05, The Boston Review
It's academic: Susanna Clarke's
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel l turns epic fantasy into literary history. J.R.R., where are you when we need you?
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Nov. 8, 2004, New York magazine
A review of
Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem and
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. A study in annoyingly extended adolescent angst, and a Sherlock Holmes-inspired meditation on mortal losses.
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Oct. 3, 2004, The Washington Post Book Club
Daemons, Dust and a brave-hearted heroine named Lyra with a world-shattering destiny. Read a transcript of my Post Book Club online discussion
here.
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Sept. 1, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Sammy's Hill by Kristin Gore. Idealistic young Senate staffer discovers love, meaningful policy change and some really bad writing on Capitol Hill in this debut novel by Al Gore's daughter. Soon to be a movie! Another reason Harvey Weinstein should never tell anyone to write a novel.
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Aug. 8, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Checkpoint. The author of
Vox gets his war on in this anti-Dubya polemic masquerading as a novel about a guy who wants to off the prez.
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July 25, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Anna Fels. Turns out you
can keep a good woman down.
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May 30, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
After by Claire Tristram. This post-9/11 novel imagines a one-night stand between an Iranian exile and the American widow of a man killed by Muslim extremists. Just because something's topical doesn't mean it's good.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6460-2004Mar18.html
An experimental novel that also satisfies an old-fashioned narrative itch. A review of
Vanishing Point by David Markson.
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January 2004, The Washington Post Book Club
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway. Read the transcript of my Post Book Club online discussion
here.
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Jan. 11, 2004, The Washington Post
Talk-show shrink shares the secrets (?) of a happy (??) marriage. A brief review of Dr. Laura's
The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.
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Nov. 16, 2003, The Washington Post
How not to make friends and influence people in cyberspace. Read an online discussion of the article
here.
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Oct. 22, 2003, The Washington Post
A review of
Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger. Twentysomething writer makes splashy New Yorker debut, publishes much-anticipated story collection. Is there talent behind the buzz?
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Sept. 28, 2003, The Washington Post
A review of
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. Girls in uniform! The 29th Discworld novel tackles gender politics and life during wartime.
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July 31, 2003, The Washington Post Book Club
Marlowe, blondes and the dirty mean streets of L.A. Read a transcript of the online discussion
here.
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April/May 2003, Boston Review
Two French "neo-polars" by Jean-Patrick Manchette take the thriller genre apart, with the help of Guy Debord and West Coast jazz.
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Sept. 1, 2002, The Washington Post
A review of
Blood of Victory by Alan Furst. This book just plain made me mad. Why is this guy so popular, anyway?
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Aug. 18, 2002, The Washington Post
A review of Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke. Yeah,
that Ethan Hawke. Not as lousy a novelist as you think he is.
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May 10, 2002, Slate
Our feet are getting bigger. Here's why.
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Feb/March 2002, Boston Review
The political thrillers of Eric Ambler. What you should be reading instead of Alan Furst.
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May 11, 2001, Slate
Rick Moody and the Magnetic Fields? Not your usual boring bookstore reading.
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Feb. 26, 1998, review, Salon
What happens when bad people sell good art.
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