The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis Journalist Michael Lewis (Moneyball) examines the friendship of two Israeli cognitive psychologists, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. Kahneman, a Holocaust survivor who lived in hiding as a child, and his younger colleague, Tversky, a...
Satirist Tom Wolfe is back with another contrarian broadside against sacred cows. In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe takes on two scientific icons, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. In this slim, provocative volume, Wolfe risks the scorn of the scientific establishment by criticizing the self-importance of these legendary figures.Wolfe contrasts...
From “A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell” by Muhammad Ali and Marianne Moore " . . .He is claiming to be the real heavyweight champBut when the fight starts he will look like a trampHe has been talking too much about me and...
Roger Angell, America's senior man of letters, returns with a collection of pieces culled from The New Yorker. Angell was a long time fiction editor and baseball columnist for the magazine. He writes gracefully about the ravages of old age, and the pleasant memories of the past which keep him going...
In 1996, David Lipsky, a New York-based Rolling Stone writer, traveled to the Midwest--Bloomington, Illinois and Minneapolis/St. Paul Minnesota--to hang out with novelist David Foster Wallace at the tail end of his Infinite Jest book tour. The proposed feature never made it into print that year (it would have been...
Jon Cryer’s So That Happened: A Memoir is the rare celebrity tell-all that is as insightful as it is entertaining. Cryer, star of Two and a Half Men, comes across as a levelheaded person in a crazy business. The author doesn’t spare us any salacious details, particularly about his time...
Colorado Senator Gary Hart was considered to be the frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination in 1987. Bai, the national political columnist for Yahoo News, recounts how an alleged adulterous affair forced the potential Democratic nominee to drop out of the race. Hart, reeling from the intense media circus...
In 2010, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) had a series of religious dialogues with a fellow Argentinian, Abraham Skorka, a Conservative Rabbi and biophysicist. The two religious leaders discussed the principle that the role of faith plays in dealing with contemporary issues such as economic inequality, euthanasia, treatment of the elderly, political corruption...
1945 was the year that radically changed the world, according to Dutch historian Ian Buruma. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, beginning the Atomic Age. General Douglas MacArthur took charge of the Supreme Command of Allied Powers. At the end of the Second World War, Europe was divided up by...
The inspiration for the new Coen brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002), was the unofficial leader of the Greenwich Village folk music scene in the late fifties and early sixties. Unlike most of the New York-based performers, Van Ronk was a New York native who grew up...
