“Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date,” writes Ronald Bailey in his review of Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-life of Facts.
You Call Those Facts? These Are Facts.
Norm Macdonald’s Book Club
“One night, in the spring of 2011, [Norm] Macdonald mentioned his love of literature, and someone suggested he start a Twitter book club. A new account was created (@NormsBookClub) and the club was born. … And then things get a little weird.”
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Let’s Find a Way to Make this Debate Happen
The London Review of Books made Jenny Diski watch and review Downton Abbey. Let’s just say she and our own Garth Risk Hallberg could probably have a nice debate about it.
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Ottessa Moshfegh on Imagination in Isolation
Ottessa Moshfegh's new book, Death in Her Hands, follows Vesta, a woman whose isolation takes on new significance in today's quarantined climate.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Danielewski; Enright; Shepard; Gibson; Lutz; Novic; Greenfeld; Gessen
Out this week: The Familiar, Volume 1 by Mark Z. Danielewski; The Green Road by Anne Enright; The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard; The Edge Becomes The Center by DW Gibson; The Daemon Knows by Harold Bloom; How to Start a Fire by Lisa Lutz; Girl at War by Sara Novic; The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld; and City by City, an essay collection edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb. For more on these books and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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The Unrealist Novel
Lev Grossman offers some first thoughts on Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the David Foster Wallace biography written by D.T. Max due out in September. More interestingly, Grossman wonders whether we’re nearing the death of hysterical realism, that manic, maximalist genre James Wood defined in his review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
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In The Shadow of Odessa
Craig Fehrman reviews Keith O’Brien’s Outside Shot, a book which follows the 2009-10 boys’ basketball team at Scott County High School in Georgetown, Kentucky. O’Brien’s book is much in the mold of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, writes Fehrman, in that it’s concerned with a “troubled town, precarious season, political resonance” – but it’s also a book that falters under the legacy of its predecessor.
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The Jamesians
“A dead, white, quasi-European male was able to survive the culture wars by becoming wised up, worldly, homosexual, feminist – Henry James, our contemporary.” But who was he, really?
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