By: Joshua Glenn

Recons invented the Web as we know it.

By: Patrick Cates

Rhyme some slang and win a t-shirt.

By: Peggy Nelson

Nothing prepares you for your first time.

By: Tom Nealon

Mayonnaise: the sauce that launched a thousand ships.

By: Matthew Battles

Darwin’s dangerous idea does more than explain the existence of life in its myriad forms and set forth a materialist worldview that makes Biblical literalists foam at the mouths. It’s also as meme with enormous […]

By: Erik Davis

The RWS Tarot is more like 1900s comic strips than Middle Age esoterica.

By: Matthew Battles

. The mere possibility of an impending announcement of a tablet from Apple has tech journalists everywhere abandoning their cynicism for bouts of credulity and wonder. But the sudden zeal with which many commentators anticipate […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]

By: James Parker

I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]

By: Matthew Battles

As a child, John Carrera was fascinated by the trove of yellowing pages of Webster’s Pictorial Dictionary he found beneath his grandfather’s chair. As a fine-press printer, he has painstakingly brought the book back to […]

By: Joshua Glenn

A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]

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 […]

By: Matthew Battles

Listening to NPR yesterday morning for the first time in a month of Sundays, I caught the puzzle segment with Will Shortz. While Will and Liane engaged in their smile-weary repartée and my wife sorted […]

By: Joshua Glenn

A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the Postmodernist Generation. Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]