An evening in late July. Zadie Smith has come home from New York for the summer, and she is about to read for the first time from a novel that has taken up the past seven or eight years of her life. H
Her previous novel, On Beauty, set in a New England university town was widely admired by critics, but Zadie Smith, whose eagerly anticipated fourth novel, NW, has just been published, has said she will not set another work in America. The author – whose public appearances are increasingly rare, and…
At some point in the course of extricating yourself from your parents’ basement by grabbing hold of that first rung on the career ladder and proceeding to climb, the proverbial question must be asked: rent or buy? For many, of course, it is not a choice at all. With the incessant rise of housing…
Books of The Times “NW,” the title of Zadie Smith’s clunky new novel, refers to northwest London, where she grew up — a multicultural corner of the city that will be familiar to readers of her dazzling debut, “White Teeth.” In that earlier book Ms. Smith took a contemporary London mapped by writers…
In the opening paragraph of “NW,” Zadie Smith’s first novel in seven years, Leah Hanwell, one of the book’s central characters, hears a line on the radio and tries to write it down on the back of the magazine she’s holding. The sentence is “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me,”…
Image from Flickr via david_shankbone By Natasha Lewis The first section of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW, fizzes with modernist urgency. Sentences jump from observation, to contemplation, to frustration, first giving a glimpse into the mind of Leah Hanwell, a thirty-something redhead who was brought…
Alta Bicycle Share also runs the Capital Bike Share program in Washington, D.C., which has logged more than 2 million trips since 2010. Euan Fisk/Flickr Shared bicycles are on their way to Portland following a vote at city council on Wednesday. Customers could rent any of 750 bikes at 75 stations…
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln
Spacing Vancouver New faces of the city Home Best Game Options Spacing Vancouver New faces of the city Home Best Game Options City Lights & Clicks: Vancouver’s Urban Playground Meets Virtual Thrills Vancouver, a city that effortlessly harmonizes the rugged beauty of nature with the sophistication of…
Every time a middle-aged former NFL player takes his own life — with the subsequent autopsy showing a brain scan that looks like something from a nursing home’s palliative-care wing — football comes one step closer to extinction. It won’t happen this year, or next year, or the year after that. But…
It began as an accident. One evening some years ago during the holiday season, I happened to find myself amongst a demographic of the population who had no spirit. A group whose numbers at this time of year are impressive, but steadfastly forgotten. An armada obtuse to the onslaught of imagery and…
Do Famous Men Know How to Read?By Kady Ruth AshcraftApril 12, 2023 | 7:31pm This Abortion Boat Sounds FishyBy Susan RinkunasAugust 17, 2022 | 4:35pm 'One-in-a-Generation Leader': Activists Remember Cecile RichardsBy Kylie CheungJanuary 21, 2025 | 10:02am The Stifling Shame I Feel As an Adult With an…
Opinion Credit...Illustration by Jimmy Turrell, from a photograph by Steve C. Mitchell/European Pressphoto Agency HERE is a story about fame. I heard it first as a fable in Somalia, before living it out in America. The fox, they say, once had an elegant walk, for which the other animals loved him.…
I’m disoriented. I like to keep my finger on the pulse, but space and time have converged, I’m losing my grip, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m getting older. I watch TV shows, movies, and it doesn’t matter when they were made—50s, 70s, 90s—if the characters are young and well-dressed, I can…
Circa Now SOMETIMES when I crave a powerful dose of humility — the kind of humility that can come only from fully apprehending the lot of those less fortunate than me — I turn my attention to the plight of the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. He experiences an exquisite kind of…
I’m an American man, and I have magnificent teeth. They are sharp and straight and perfectly aligned. Wide, flat incisors in the front for severing fibers. Pointed cuspids at the sides for tearing away tissue. Jagged molars in the back for grinding cartilage and ligament. They gleam like chrome.…
It’s not exactly a new idea that technology is overwhelming readers. Clever blogs and author Tweets, e-books, the Times online with compelling video, the New Yorker appealingly designed for iPad. Nons
Tech OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica review Where Lion stumbled, Mountain Lion regroups and forges ahead. John Siracusa – Jul 25, 2012 7:35 am | 276 Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more Apple’s traditional desktop computing business has suffered many indignities over…
Karl Pearson, English mathematician and eugenicist, in 1912 Photo by Wikimedia Commons. Depressed people send more email. They spend more time on Gchat. Researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology recently assessed some college students for signs of melancholia then tracked…
Self-portrait by Chris Ware, including his teenage, “version 2.0 ‘stoner’ self.” Thanks to this wonderful piece a reader sent us that went up just the other day, I don’t really need to tell you who Chris Ware is. I will say, however, that if I could ask all humans to read just one thing, it would be…
I Love Transit 2012: looking back on a life of transit travel with Frances Bula July 20, 2012 I Love Transit 2012: looking back on a life of transit travel with Frances Bula July 20, 2012 A Vancouver
Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Source: Heritage Images / Getty The Great Divorce The marriage between Europe and the United States has been fraught from the first—and now it might be coming apart. Eliot A. Cohen The Sports Conspiracy That’s Too Easy to Believe Kaitlyn Tiffany America’s…
Too young for Generation X. Too old for the Millennials. I read Coupland's opus as a teenager. My impression? Wow, it sucks to be them. I have about as much in common with Generation X as the entitled, gadget-horny infant that stereotypes the demographic of those born just a few years later. And I'm…
Op-Ed Contributor Omaha SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.” Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain…
Luke Crane @Burning_Luke Why are there so few lady game creators? Mon, Nov 26 2012 17:50:18 Retweet Favorite https://twitter.com/Burning_Luke/status/273121518362439680 — Luke Crane (@Burning_Luke) Mon, Nov 26 2012 17:50:18 While Luke's question kicked off the conversation, I don't quote many of his…
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff . That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind. Dustin’s…
… Zip drives ate floppies. CDs ate Zips. DVDs ate CDs. SD cards ate film. LCDs ate CRTs. Telephony ate telegraphy. Text messaging ate talking. Tablets are eating our paper … Imagine a table: Hundreds of meters long and wooden. Worn and oiled. Old and knotted. Wide enough for a person. Now — open the…
Fake Geek Girls: The Geeks Have Inherited The Earth, But What’s Next? By Alyssa Rosenberg I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars ,…
Your yearly dose of economic irrationality. Photo: Michael Nagle/Getty Images There are many, many reasons not to participate in Black Friday. Maybe you like sleeping in and spending time with family more than lining up in a mall parking lot at 2 a.m. Maybe you object on humanitarian grounds to the…
"There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253." So begins Geoff Ryman's 253, created in 1996 as a website that used the natural grammar of the web, hyperlinks, to tell the…
Last night, in reaction to the BritRuby situation, I wrote a post on Facebook. People have been asking that it be placed on the public web. Well, here it is. The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation and other conference type stuff…
Jonathan Twingley for The Chronicle Review A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from…
Jennifer Dziura writes life coaching advice weekly here on TheGloss, and career coaching advice Fridays on TheGrindstone. On the night of the election, I was alone in my apartment, refreshing CNN.com. The electoral tally went above 270. I refreshed again! Finally, the headline! I wanted to share…
After decades of domination by the baby-boom generation, Canadian politics will soon be the domain of Generation Xers and Millenials. Future Concerns is a regular column that investigates the political issues that are, or will soon be, emerging in Canada’s mainstream debates, as the inevitable…
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