August 12, 2009

Julia Child: A turning point in the making of American cuisine

Needless to say, with the release of the film Julie & Julia, Julia Child is once again very much in the news. Child and her wildly popular show The French Chef are also one of the “thirty turning points in...

August 11, 2009

New report on eduction / The Common Good Forecaster

Earlier this summer the American Human Development Project released a report exploring the impact of education. With the school year approaching it seemed an appropriate time to look at some of the report’s findings many of which reflect the data...

August 10, 2009

History of the Mafia by Salvatore Lupo

The Financial Times recently reviewed Salvatore Lupo’s History of the Mafia along with Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey through the Italian South, by David Lane. As the review points out, both books explore the Mafia’s resilience and...

August 7, 2009

The blog of Gianni Vattimo

Every so often we like to check in and remind readers of the blogs written by Columbia University Press authors. The phrase “public intellectual” is probably at once both misunderstood and overused. However, it would be hard to deny that...

August 6, 2009

Zhu Wen’s filthy fiction

Julia Lovell, translator of Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars and Other Stories, has a great article on China Beat that discusses the author’s currently untranslated novella My Little Brother’s Performance (Didi de yanzou). The novella recounts, in often graphic detail,...

August 5, 2009

Ang Lee

With the complete retrospective of his films currently running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and with his next film Taking Woodstock due to release later this month, Ang Lee is once again in the news. For those interested...

August 4, 2009

Christopher Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi, takes The Page 99 Test

Taking Ford Maddox Ford’s suggestion to heart (“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you”), the Page 99 Test asks authors to focus in on this particular page. The...

August 3, 2009

Eating History: Thirty Points in the Making of American Cuisine

Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, by Andrew Smith, is not due until October, but with Michael Pollan‘s article in the New York Times Magazine, published on Sunday, on the way Americans now eat and...

August 3, 2009

A Fistful of Euros reviews Gianni Vattimo's "Autobiography"

A Fistful of Euros, a prominent blog focusing on European politics and culture recently reviewed Gianni Vattimo’s Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography calling it “a delicious mix of philosophy, history, politics, ‘gayness’ and the personal experiences and thoughts of...

July 31, 2009

Salon takes on the Huffington Post's coverage of health and science

In a Salon article already generating a lot of discussion on the Internet, Dr. Rahul K. Parikh suggests that the Huffington Post’s coverage of health and wellness issues “seems defined mostly by bloggers who are friends of [Arianna] Huffington or...

July 31, 2009

Health care for the Blue Dogs — Jacob Hacker

Earlier this week, Jacob Hacker, editor of Health at Risk: America’s Health System—And How to Heal It, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on the “Blue Dog” Democrats’ apprehension about Obama’s health care plan. Hacker argues that while the...

July 30, 2009

James Millward revisits the Urumchi unrest

In an essay for the Web site China Beat, James Millward, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, examines the recent violence earlier this month in the western Chinese city of Urumchi and the disputed claims about what caused...