One Millionaire’s Quest to Build the Biggest Library on Earth   Here’s the problem with libraries. They catch on fire really easily. As such, they were the prized targets of the invading hordes of antiquity – the model collections of knowledge of their times, whose only fault was...

Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel...

In his new book, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues that we’re thinking about worldchanging innovation all wrong: It’s not going to come from where we expect it. Bottom-Up Solutions To Top-Down Problems => Deductive Reasoning to Solve How We Perceive the World   The world is currently...

To be a writer is, in effect, to be an editor as well. This is true whether you are the sort of writer who throws on the page everything that runs through your mind and later carves it into shape, or the sort that fashions and perfects every sentence before moving on to the next. It does not...

Living alone doesn’t mean being lonely   “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ” by Eric Klinenberg “Going Solo” examines a dramatic demographic trend: the startling increase in adults living alone. Along the way, the book navigates some...

The past is another country — but an alternate history is a whole new world. The best alternate histories can make you see the real history of our world in a whole new way, and make you realize that events that seem like they were inevitable… may not have been. But an alternate history...

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages, twenty . . . seventy? Such feats of linguistic prowess provide a glimpse into what the human brain is capable of–and hold up a mirror to our desire to live without language barriers on a...

Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the question cosmologist Lawrence Krauss tackles in his new book, A Universe from Nothing. In it, he surveys the discoveries that have led to scientists’ current understanding of the universe, and explores what the future of the...

Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. New, old, and dead writers offer their advice for stepping up your literary game.   These parallel aspirations are a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your...

Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever. The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears...

Why did you choose go to sleep last night at the particular time you did? Maybe you were just plain tired. But, chances are, there were other factors involved in that decision, as well. Where you hoping to get a certain number of hours of rest before you had to get up and go to work? Maybe it...

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer...

Physicists try to understand the universe by seeking out its patterns and regularities, all of which are most successfully expressed in the language of mathematics. Amid seemingly endless strings of equations, a handful of numbers stand out. These are the physical constants, numbers that hold...

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the...

We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be...

Science has a lot of uses. It can uncover laws of nature, cure disease, inspire awe, make bombs, and help bridges to stand up. Indeed science is so good at what it does that there’s a perpetual temptation to drag it into problems where it may add little or even distract from the real issues....

“The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published. We’re not going to get there, but that’s our goal,” Brewster Kahle said. The man behind a project to file every webpage, Internet Archive, now wants to gather one copy of every published book....

In a time before the internet, children gathered among stacks of books arranged according to letters and numbers taped to their spines. There, a wise person known as a teacher-librarian would guide students’ imaginations to far off places through the pages of atlases, encyclopedias and other...

Have you read about “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr? A 43-page list of rules of usage, principles of style and commonly misused words. It was a brief for brevity. “Vigorous writing is concise, When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.” EB White added an...

They have always had a dusty image – and never more so than now – but libraries are at the heart of our communities. With the axe about to fall, Bella Bathurst reveals just what we’re about to lose. You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal. Every year, the...