Little time -- and energy -- to blog tonight (I have a review to work on), but the day cannot end without acknowledging that on this date in...

The other day, in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan had a piece about our "elites" making "A Separate Peace" . Today...

The Guardian recently published some excerpts from Robert Winston's forthcoming book, The Story of God . I don't know about the boo...

It has been a wearisome week at The Inquirer. There is a buyout offer on the table and quite a few people have signed up for it. People I ha...

Debra Matsumoto, publicity manager for North Atlantic Books , sent me an interesting email the other, which she gave me permission to share:...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote George Santayana . This piece by Jonathan V. Last offers...

Oni Lasana , one of the email correspondents who was critical of the last line of my review on Sunday of Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the...

And now for another behind-the scenes glimpse in the life of a newspaper book review editor: In my review yesterday of Caryl Phillips's...

Earlier this month I posted some thoughts about The trouble with experts in which I commented somewhat unfavorably on a column by George Wi...

In the Oct. 8 edition of the British magazine The Spectator, historian Paul Johnson made a most interesting point in a column headlined ...

This past summer, my colleague Tanya Barrientos wrote an excellent piece about the explosion in self-publishing. Scores of thousands of book...

The book I am currently reading for review, Henry Hitchings's Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionar...

Last night, my wife and I went to see Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea in a production at the Lantern Theater Company . The production was...

In August, commenting on a post of mine -- Exploring the mind ... , Melville Goodwin cited Joseph Epstein as a worthy, contemporary counter...

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Carlin Romano wrote an excellent review of Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle . In the ...

Harold Pinter has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I can't say I've ever been much of a fan myself. Pinter's work h...

I am on vacation this week and yesterday my wife and I traveled to Manhattan to see a fine production of Henrik Ibsen 's great play The ...

Katie Haegele, who filled in for me here briefly this past summer, and who reviews young adult books -- and much else besides -- for The Inq...

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil is, I think, one of the really important books to come out this year. My review of it appears in ...

Last month, I posted some thoughts on The Matter of Experts . With the President's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the...

Dave Lull, commenting on my earlier post noting Wallace Stevens's birthday, quotes Randall Jarrell as saying that Stevens "wrote so...

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has a post with an extensive quote from the transcipt of the President's news conference today. Hard to r...

Wallace Stevens was born on this date in 1879, in Reading, Pa. I am unusually fond of his poetry. Every year I manage to read most of The C...

Roger Simon cites hemoclysm as the new vocabulary word of the day. Why, we only used it here yesterday! And in reference to much the same...

I came upon this interesting debate via Instapundit yesterday. I think that Ann Althouse's point is well taken. To be a great artist -...

In his play Lady Windermere's Fan , Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value ...

The Inquirer announced a buyout offer this week in order to facilitate a reduction of newsroom staff by 16 percent -- 75 jobs. The newspaper...

Sept. 26 has but an hour and 20 minutes left, but before midnight I want to note that on this date in 1888 T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis,...

"Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back, When gold and silver becks me to come on." So says Philip the Bastard in Shakes...

My previous post has elicited some incisive comments, to which I feel I should add some further observations. As David Montgomery points out...

Last week I noted that Barbara Grosh's novel Tenure Track to Mommyville had won Xerox's Asprining Authors contest. So I think it w...

Walking to work this morning I passed a fellow outside the University of the Arts who was wearing a t-shirt with the words "Arte Diem...

Last Sunday, Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano reviewed Salman Rushdie's new novel Shalimar the Clown . Carlin liked the book a lot and...

Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar chronicles a train trip Theroux took from Britain to Japan and back, aboard such romantic-sound...

Last week, after posting a little something about King Canute , I found myself in a most interesting discussion of the principle of subsidia...

SciFi author Dafydd ab Hugh, a frequent guest blogger, now has a blog of his own , on which he has posted a most interesting piece about how...

Some years ago I attended a lecture given by John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, at the Center for Theological Inquiry in ...

I have discussed Michel de Montaigne here a number of times lately. Well, 413 years ago today, the great man died. Mass was being said in hi...

Xerox Corp., in partnership with Lulu.com, a provider of free online publishing tools, and ColorCentric Corporation, a Rochester-based comme...

I am not known to be a frequenter of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. But I attended one of its events tonight and I'm here to say it w...

Given all the blame being heaped upon President Bush for having been somehow responsible for the debacle in New Orleans following Hurricane ...

Yesterday (Sept. 10) was the anniversary of the birth, in 1890, of Franz Werfel , a writer sadly neglected today. Here is an interesting pie...

After Mass today the church bells rang 10 times while the congregation prayed silently in mmemory of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. I mentio...

Today in Literature notes that today was an important date in the life of James Joyce .

Jim Bowman's Blithe Spirit draws our attention to Blupete , a blog out of Nova Scotia filled with interesting information about poets, ...

I have on a number of occasions stated here that my principal objection to intelligent design theory is that it seems to involve a category ...

I have had the privilege of teaming with Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher twice -- last year in Dublin for the Centenary of Bloomsday , an...

David Aaronovitch in the Times of London discerns another fissure in conservatism.

In my post yesterday I said that Jonathan Rauch's review of Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family was the best review of the book I had...

Jonathan Rauch has written a review of Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good that is by far the best I h...

It is, I believe, fairly widely known that newspapers are having a hard time of it these days. Circulation figures and ad revenues are both ...

The Instapundit interviews Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near . It's long and pretty detailed -- there are even graphs --...

Glenn Reynolds, over at Instapundit, has a comprehensive List of Agencies to whom you can make a contribution on behalf of the people tryin...

I just got home about an hour ago. I had to spend several hours shelving the books that had piled up over the past few days. I couldn't ...

Now here's a thoroughly and comprehensively contrarian view: Czech President Vaclav Klaus speech at the Regional Meeting of the Mont Pe...

Allen Thorpe has some interesting thoughts about science and intelligent design.

I am finally able to resume blogging. Since photographer Eric Mencher and I headed upstate to do some reporting, my time has had to be budge...