Science shows that the only way around some readers' prejudices is to trick them

Peter James has been on risky police raids, spoken with some of Britain's most dangerous psychopaths, and put up with his own stalker for 10 years.

Some would argue that books need to evolve into apps or other forms of multimedia–that books won’t be appreciated by large numbers of people until appreciating a book ceases to involve reading it. While this may be an accurate discussion of the public’s habits (far more people saw the Hunger Games than read it), it [...]

The author of a book called "Shades of Gray" says her work is being confused with that of a chart-topping erotic fiction writer.

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, "The problem with this story is that it could damage your health": Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet "The Aleppo Codex," Matti Friedman's account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world's most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it's nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman's health, it probably happened when he realized what he'd stumbled into and his reporter's heart started beating in doubletime.Continue Reading...

No, actually, not so much. About 20 years ago a film/VHS project I produced was nominated for a prestigious American Film Institute Award. I know it was prestigious because they told me it was, and because a lot of celebrities were going to be at the gala. I got my tux, used money I didn’t [...]

Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.Continue Reading...

Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl — a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little street curling down from Place de la République.We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: 15 minutes to Notre Dame; 25 to the Louvre.Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the 19th or the 20th — if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.Continue Reading...

Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl — a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little street curling down from Place de la République.We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: 15 minutes to Notre Dame; 25 to the Louvre.Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the 19th or the 20th — if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.Continue Reading...

The people who run the big publishing houses feel threatened by Amazon and by ebooks and by pricing and by the death of chain bookstores, not to mention the Justice Department. All of these are contributors to the future, but they cloud the core issue. The narrative of their fear is that book publishing will [...]

A Christchurch man has been piecing together the history of every Lego figure released since 1975.

“Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” When Bob Dylan wrote that line in 1964, the naked emperor was Lyndon Johnson, which makes that image perhaps the most disturbing in all of Dylan’s apocalyptic work.By stripping down Lyndon Baines Johnson to his essence, Robert Caro has himself become an American legend. Since the publication of "The Path to Power" in 1982, Caro has transformed LBJ’s life into a cautionary tale of Shakespearean dimensions. In some wonky circles, the release of a new volume is heralded like the Summer of Love release of “Sgt. Pepper's.” Can Caro possibly top his “Revolver"?”I am proud to be one of those wonks.  Anticipating the release of "The Passage of Power," I went full-metal LBJ, and reread every word of the previous 1,040 page “prequel” – “Master of the Senate.” Much like catching up on the last season of “Mad Men” before the new one begins, I time-traveled like the hero from the new Stephen King JFK-themed novel back to 1958, as the Master Senator (and Master Biographer) prepared for their rendezvous with world history.Continue Reading...

The following things are so commonplace that they are almost beyond noticing: A visit to Costco turns up quite a few items produced by a brand called “Kirkland,” which is owned, naturally, by Costco. Checking out of Barnes and Noble in many large cities and you’re likely to see the Zagat’s restaurant guide near the [...]

"Bring Up the Bodies," Hilary Mantel's follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, "Wolf Hall," is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form -- by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted -- but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we're sharing with them.As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from "Wolf Hall" declares, "He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury."Continue Reading...

If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year – one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory -- were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture that’s dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.Continue Reading...