The Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library (Kike Calvo/AP Images)
Google and the New Digital Future Robert Darnton
Google has by now digitized some ten million books. On what terms will it make those texts available to readers? The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit.
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? Tony Judt
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel Ian Buruma
When General de Gaulle told his compatriots in 1944 that there was only one "eternal France," and that all French patriots had stood up to the Nazi invaders, this myth was gratefully received. The more complicated reality was slow to emerge. But even though the murkier picture of collaboration and compromise, as well as heroic resistance, is now generally accepted in France, a confrontation with the superficial normality of wartime Paris can still come as a shock.
Bacon Agonistes John Richardson
On an early visit to the studio, I watched Francis experiment. Ensconced in front of a mirror, he rehearsed on his own face the brushstrokes that he envisaged making on the canvas. With a flourish of the wrist, he would apply great swoops of Max Factor "pancake" makeup in a gamut of flesh colors to the stubble on his chin. Besides setting his faces and figures spinning, gestural twists endow his portrait heads—to my mind far and away his most powerful and original works—with a dose of his own inner turmoil.
The Big Muslim Problem! Malise Ruthven
It is clear that as a religion formulated during an era of political ascendancy, the mainstream traditions of Islam have yet to find comfortable moorings as minorities in the contested public spaces of a secular, pluralist West.
Growing Up Female Cathleen Schine
It is a sign of just how intelligent and generous a writer Gail Collins is that by the end of her new book, the feminist dilemma seems less an incurable virus than a challenge, one that has already been met with so much energy, stubborn courage, and radical hope, not to mention desperation, drama, and, sometimes, in retrospect, downright silliness, that we feel we are all on a human adventure, and all on it together.
Plus: Christopher Ricks on Jane Campion's Bright Star, John Lanchester on Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Jay Neugeboren on Michael Greenberg's Beg, Borrow, Steal, Neal Ascherson on A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and more.
