March 15, 2010

Edward Hess on Smart Growth

Edward Hess discusses his new book Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth. For more on the book, you can also read an interview in which Hess challenges conventional thinking regarding growth and business. From...

March 12, 2010

My Life with the Taliban video and NYT interview

The New York Times blog At War recently interviewed Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten, editors of My Life with the Taliban, the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Afghanistan’s Taliban and a principal actor...

March 11, 2010

Siobhan Phillips: "Poems and Everyday Reading"

The following post is by Siobhan Phillips author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. When I wrote The Poetics of the Everyday, I wanted to learn how quotidian experience could foster rather than frustrate...

March 9, 2010

Billy Collins and David Allen Sibley discuss Bright Wings

In anticipation of tomorrow’s reading from Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds the American Museum of Natural History, the museum’s Web site has posted interviews with the book’s editor Billy Collins and illustrator David Allen Sibley. Collins...

March 8, 2010

The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor

While discussion of Kathryn Bigelow’s work is sure to grow following last night’s win at the Oscars, currently one of the few books to give serious consideration to her films is The Cinema of of Kathryn Bigelow, edited by Deborah...

March 5, 2010

The Basement Boys: George Will on Gary Cross's Men to Boys

It’s not every day that a prominent conservative columnist discusses a university press book, so it is worth mentioning the lengthy references by George Will in his Newsweek column to Gary Cross’s Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity....

March 3, 2010

Need the right quote? There's an app for that!

The Columbia World of Quotations is now available as app for the iPhone, and features 65,000 quotations by more than 5,000 authors covering 3,000 years—from Bella Abzug to Frank Zappa and Galileo to Themistocles. The application is based on an...

March 2, 2010

Is film criticsm dead? Thomas Doherty weighs in.

“‘It sucks,’ decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes...

March 1, 2010

How Untouchables are changing the face of Indian literature

“What we’re doing is creating a new history of India that’s not in the textbooks.”—Omprakash Valmiki, author of Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life. The above quote comes from a recent interview with Valmiki published in an article from the Wall Street...

February 26, 2010

Avner Cohen on Iran, the bomb, and its threat to Israel

“What if our leaders and pundits had reacted to the Iranian nuclear program in a completely different way than they actually have?”—Avner Cohen, from a recent op-ed in Haaretz In a recent op-ed, Iranian threat to destroy Israel doesn’t hold...

February 25, 2010

Arab responses to Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab's Contemporary Arab Thought

Elizabeth Kassab How have Arab readers and critics responded to Kassab’s new book Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective? The book was recently reviewed in in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat (review is in Arabic). For those who cannot...

February 24, 2010

Believing in Tiger Woods — Mark Hulsether in Religion Dispatches

With seemingly everyone in the world weighing in on Tiger Woods, we thought we would add a new perspective via Mark Hulsether, professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Tennessee and author of Religion, Culture and...