skopia
Nobody has written funnier prose about drink. Kingsley Amis separates the physical hangover from the metaphysical one, calculates what a party will actually consume, and hands down recipes he plainly tested.
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
Beauty and utility generate each other, Paul Rand argues, and the designer's job is fusing idea with image. He pulled European modernism into American advertising and made the trade take design seriously.
Speech therapy for a lisp, a methamphetamine phase of conceptual art, then a Paris classroom where a French teacher reduces grown adults to stammering. Sedaris finds humiliation funny and never spares himself.
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
Curious why the juice from a Penn Station machine changed color through the winter, McPhee went to Florida. He came back with citrus botany, grove barons, and the entire industry of frozen concentrate.
At an Aspen party a man lectures Solnit about an important new book on the photographer Muybridge. She wrote it. Her essays track how silencing women shades into violence against them.
For three days in October 1974, Perec sat in cafes on the Place Saint-Sulpice and wrote down every bus, pigeon, and passerby. Look long enough, he shows, and nothing is background.
Still the sharpest book written about rock and roll. Marcus treats Elvis, Robert Johnson, and Sly Stone as American artists on the scale of Melville, reading their records for what America is.
At a 1979 feminist conference that had sidelined Black and lesbian women, Lorde said the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. These essays turn anger and difference into working instruments.
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
Beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Koren traces the aesthetic from the Japanese tea room to the cracked bowl, and gives Western design a language for everything corporate polish cannot reach.
The camera is a sketchbook, Cartier-Bresson insists, an instrument of intuition and not of art. These short essays hand you the working method that made modern photojournalism look the way it does.
Genius does not explain art, Bourdieu argues. Value is manufactured by the whole apparatus around the work: critics, dealers, publishers, rival artists. In this economy refusing money is precisely what buys prestige.
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
To love at all is to be vulnerable, Lewis writes, then sorts the risk into affection, friendship, eros and charity. Each natural love turns demonic the moment it is made into a god.
Liebling covered Rocky Marciano knocking out an aging Joe Louis, writing the trainers and cornermen with as much relish as the champions. He set the standard American boxing writing still works from.
What holds men to war, Gray decided, is the spectacle, the comradeship, and a delight in destruction nobody admits to. The day his Columbia doctorate arrived, so did his draft notice.
How do you go about finding a thing whose nature is unknown to you? Solnit carries that question from Plato into deserts, ruins, and the blue of distance, making lostness a discipline.
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
Mitchell listened to New York for decades: the regulars at McSorley's, the fishermen at Fulton Market, and Joe Gould, a Village drifter compiling a nine-million-word oral history from everything he overheard.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the title essay begins, then takes the story apart: the Manson trial, a Doors session going nowhere, and a psychiatric report on Didion herself.
For a year Dillard watches a creek in Virginia's mountains, where a giant water bug drains a frog to an empty skin. She wants to know what kind of God made this world.
Leopold shot a wolf and watched the green fire go out of her eyes. Land is a community we belong to, he concluded, and his land ethic became American environmentalism's creed.
Standing before a Connecticut congregation in 1741, Edwards said God holds sinners over hell as one holds a spider over a fire. The moaning grew so loud he had to pause.
Dyer imagines his way into the nights of jazz musicians, Lester Young after the army broke him and Thelonious Monk alone at a piano, inventing scenes to reach what no biography can.
You arrive in Antigua as a tourist and Kincaid tells you what you look like to the people who live there, then turns on the empire and the government that wrecked the island.
Seven nights on a Caribbean luxury liner, where the pampering drives Wallace to despair. He also traces how television swallowed the irony American novelists invented, and why that irony became a trap.
Sent to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks whether boiling an animal alive is defensible. The same scruple drives his reports on a porn awards show and Senator McCain's presidential campaign.
Freedom from interference and freedom to become your true self are different things, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned, and tyrants prefer the second. His Tolstoy essay divides all thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes.
Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage, writes Okakura, a Japanese art curator addressing the West, who then draws from one cup an entire aesthetic of imperfection and attention.
Weil held that the soul falls by a law as fixed as gravity and that grace enters only a void, which is why affliction, stripping everything away, can open a person to God.
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
Niebuhr's argument: an individual can rise above self-interest and a nation cannot, so justice comes from power balanced against power. Cold War strategists and Martin Luther King alike thought in his terms.
Hoggart set down working-class Leeds as he had lived it, then indicted the slick magazines displacing it. Seven years later he founded the Birmingham center that made popular culture an academic discipline.
Weber told students in a collapsing Germany what science and politics demand: science can give you clarity but never choose your values, and politics is the slow boring of hard boards.
Americans tell themselves a story of innocence, abundance, and invincibility. The South knew defeat, poverty, and the guilt of slavery, and Woodward offers that history as the corrective a superpower needs.
The legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and a hindrance to human improvement. Mill wrote that when a married Englishwoman could own nothing and had no vote.