Adam Gopnik's third lecture considers the making of the modern Christmas, winter's holiday. He describes it as a "profoundly compound festival" and discusses its origins. It marries "not just many different pagan holidays but also the two chief kinds of festivals that exist in the world: the reversal festival and
"Baseball – what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around." Chad Harbach's debut novel shares its title with a guide to playing baseball, which includes meditative observations on the art of life itself. It's a
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
"If you just read one book this year, read this one." Perhaps more than any other book I've read this year, Monoculture makes me want to say that. Which is ironic: because Monoculture is about one story. (And I know how much you all love to read stories.) The premise
Adam Gopnik begins his second lecture on winter (first, here) by asking whether we remember that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein plays out in the northern, Arctic reaches. I didn't remember that: did you? Nonetheless, I don't have any trouble conjuring up the images that he describes in opening his
