What neuroscience, philosophy and a quieter life can teach us about the most important thing we have stopped doing properly. We have not stopped reading. If anything, we read more than any generation in human history: feeds, newsletters, threads, captions, notifications, summaries of things we intend to read later. We are drowning in text. What…
Basic Books | Music, Culture There is a particular kind of book that does not simply describe its subject but transforms your relationship to it. Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz is that kind of book. Read it on a Tuesday evening and by Wednesday morning you will hear music differently… more attentively, more…
Vintage | Short Stories There is a moment in the title story of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber when the narrator, a young bride alone in her husband’s castle, opens a forbidden door and finds something that will change her forever. It is a moment of dread and recognition in equal measure, the feeling that…
William Morrow | Philosophy, Essays There are books that arrive at exactly the right moment, and books that arrive long before the culture is ready for them. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living, published in 1937, belongs firmly to the second category. A Chinese philosopher writing in English, addressing a Western world he found baffling…
Penguin | Aphorisms and Personal Observations There is a particular pleasure in a book that does not ask you to start at the beginning. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes is that kind of book: a collection of aphorisms that can be opened anywhere, read for five minutes or fifty, and set down without…
Fitzcarraldo Editions | Translated by Sasha Dugdale There are books you read, and books you inhabit. Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory is firmly the latter: a slow, circling, quietly devastating meditation on family, photography, objects and the nature of remembering itself. It is one of those rare works that changes the way you look…