Tag: books
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The Self-making Man
On Religion Dispatches this morning, I’ve got a new review of Thomas Carlson’s latest book, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. Carlson was my philosophy teacher at UC Santa Barbara—and a remarkable teacher at that. We worked harder in his graduate seminars that in any other class, and every bit was worth…
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The Future of Publishing Round-up
This month I left my part-time job at The New York Times. Actually, now that I’m done, I can forget about Times style conventions and write “the New York Times” or even “the New York Times”! Very satisfying. Anyway. It was a fine place to work (particularly thanks to the cafeteria) but after a year,…
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Numbers into Buildings
Being sick in bed on this Christmas Eve in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico has afforded me the welcome opportunity to spend the day with Peter Tompkins’s Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. Tompkins, a journalist, World War II spy, and occult theorist (AP obituary; profile), was a fixture in the background of my childhood.…
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Population Bombs
Population was to the 1970s what climate change is to today. Academia was in a frenzy, governments dragged their feet, and disaster seemed unavoidable anyway. The Al Gore of that period was Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford who wrote the mega-bestseller The Population Bomb. After the mass starvations he had imagined for the…
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The First Journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus came to me as a birthday present in the beautiful Adirondacks in August. Not till the last couple of weeks, while traveling in Turkey and Jordan, did I get the chance to read it. The timing, as it turned out, was just about perfect. I wouldn’t call it a great…
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Dialogue in the Dark
It totally slipped my notice that, a couple days ago, Religion Dispatches posted my latest article, a review of Michael Novak’s No One Sees God. This one, unfortunately, may inspire more ire from the anti-atheists. But I promise, I genuinely tried to move a more sensible conversation forward on all sides. Take a look at…
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Can Creationism Go on Forever?
AlterNet has just posted a review I did of Lauri Lebo’s The Devil in Dover, an account of the 2005 evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. It was a real treat to do the article, since I wrote my college thesis on the Dover trial while it was going on. As another round of my usual…
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The Local Neighborhood Conspiracy
Religion Dispatches has just put up my review of Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family, about a secret Christian political organization headquartered in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Like the emperor’s new clothes, power is invisible to those who don’t happen to know about it. One could, as I did, spend eighteen years growing up less…