In an excerpt from ‘The Library Book’ — inspired by a historic California library fire — Susan Orlean challenges her respect for the printed word with a match and a copy of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’
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How to Burn a Book
In an excerpt from ‘The Library Book’ — inspired by a historic California library fire — Susan Orlean challenges her respect for the printed word with a match and a copy of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me
“Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”
“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”
Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel
“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’
Emily Nussbaum talks about why TV’s relationship with its audience has become more intimate, whether we can blame Trump on True Detective, and how a TV critic’s biggest challenge is just figuring out what to watch.
The Growing Power of Prosecutors
An unintended consequence of mandatory minimums has been to concentrate too much power in the hands of prosecutors. Journalist Emily Bazelon talks about how some cities are pushing back.
The Blaming of the Shrew
Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.
‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II
Bassey Ikpi discusses writing about mental illness. “I could count on the morning. It became the thing that existed without my input… without determining whether or not I was worthy of it.”
Walking Across California
To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.
