Reader’s Corner
Reveling in and discussing ideas and books, together.
Cultures
Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia
AS LIVING EXPERIMENTS GO, Fruitlands probably ranks among the more ill-conceived utopian communities…
When a Billion Chinese Jump
CHINA, GREEN OR BLACK? As the country continues its rapid development, this may prove to be the defining…
Finders Keepers
NEAR THE BEGINNING of Craig Childs’s impassioned, eloquent, and often distressed book Finders…
In the Empire of Ice
GRETEL EHRLICH’S newest work, In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape,…
In Motion
WHEN I RETURNED to the United States after living for a year in the Netherlands, I returned to a gloriously…
Packing for Mars
LIKE HER PREVIOUS BOOKS exploring cadavers, coitus, and the afterlife, Mary Roach’s Packing…
The Wayfinders
HALF OF THE seven thousand existing languages in the world are not being taught to the youngest generation…
Notes on a Lost Flute
LIKE BEADS IN a wampum belt, writers carefully stitch together words to create images, but what is…
Effigies
THE NONHUMAN WORLD doesn’t speak our language. At least not here, not now. Thus poetry can be…
Heart of Dryness
IN ANCIENT SUMER, the residents of Umma destroyed the water supply of a rival city-state. India and…
