This short story by John Updike returned to my attention this past week, thanks to the Byliner, a marvelous experiment in online reading and publishing. “The Full Glass,” like so much of Updike’s fiction, is a guy’s story—an old guy’s story, in this instance. “Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as […]

Since 2011, Ohio has “added 94,000 new jobs, and its unemployment rate had fallen from 9 percent to 7.3. (The most recent data pushed the total number of new jobs to more than 122,000, with the unemployment rate holding at 7.2 percent — more than a full point below the national average.)”  So who should […]

“We are the 99%” the chant goes.  But in Oakland, this is clearly not the case. The motley crew marching under the Occupy banner clearly hold values that are far outside the American mainstream. Mayor Jean Quan learned this the hard way. When Occupiers en masse began squatting in a public area, Jonathan Mahler writes, […]

The United States is drawing down its forces in Afghanistan.  Some military personnel will remain for untold years to come, but the vast majority of troops will be gone in 2014.  Many Americans favor getting out of Afghanistan, and the country’s fiscal troubles make leaving all the more appealing. More broadly, the sense that things […]

Globalization has brought dengue fever to America via mosquitoes. Michael Specter writes, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are among the deadliest creatures on earth. Before a vaccine was discovered in the nineteen-thirties, the mosquito transmitted the yellow-fever virus to millions of people with devastating efficiency. The mosquito also carries dengue, one of the most rapidly spreading viral […]

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a book with a huge reputation, despite the fact that so many people have never dared to read it. It is, for sure, no quick summer beach read; but that does not mean it is an aloof, oblique, concentration-vacuum, like Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Joyce’s Ulysses is a raunchy […]