R+M (1): SPICY, GREEN, OUTGOING

By: Joe Alterio

Monster: “Spicy, Green, Outgoing” — by Joe Alterio *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our […]

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Frank Herbert

By: Joshua Glenn

Alia, a telepathic four-year-old girl who, in the bestselling science fiction novel of all time, roams the battlefields of Arrakis slitting the throats of imperial stormtroopers, gained her powers in utero because her mother drank […]

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the best book ever (results)

By: Matthew Battles

I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]

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Thor Heyerdahl

By: Matthew Battles

THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido to prove Finland’s nomadic Sami peopled Japan; he might have shown […]

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Middlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 9/27/09

By: Joshua Glenn

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]

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Flann O’Brien

By: James Parker

The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of […]

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Buster Keaton

By: Joe Alterio

At one point in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), we find washed-up silent film stars literally and figuratively playing out their last hands. A small ashen-faced man declines to bid on consecutive hands, and with […]

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Talib Kweli

By: Tom Nealon

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief) because of Middlebrow’s coopting efforts than TALIB KWELI (born 1975). Anointed the savior of hip hop after 1998’s brilliant Mos Def and Talib […]

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A. E. Waite

By: Erik Davis

Within the western current of occult mysticism, A. E. WAITE (1857–1942) stands out as a prototype of the modern scholar-practitioner — an initiate and seeker who was nonetheless devoted to mapping and organizing the occult […]

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Dizzee Rascal

By: Patrick Cates

DIZZEE RASCAL (born 1985) grew up in Bow, an East London ghetto of burnt-out mopeds, stabbings, pitbulls, and postcode turf wars between gangs of angry teenagers. After a prescient teacher gave him the know-how to […]

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