Helen Andrews

The profusion of “recovery memoirs” in the last ten years has been so abundant as to make a person ask where the genre has been all this time. The modern concept of addiction, as distinct from mere sinfulness or deficiency of willpower, has been around for two hundred years. For . . . . Continue Reading »

I haven’t followed the distraction wars very closely. That’s not a joke, I really haven’t paid close attention. I gather that a bunch of people of varying degrees of seriousness have expressed concerns about the effect the Internet has had on the way people think. A listicle of their worries . . . . Continue Reading »

Against Fairness by Stephen T. Asma Chicago, 224 pages, $22.50 Stephen Asma buries in the endnotes of Against Fairness the information that he is from Chicago, but I think it ought to be mentioned up front. His book is a counterintuitive defense of favoritism, nepotism, tribalism, and patronage, . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a period, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, when the history of the Russian temperance movement became thoroughly intertwined with the history of Russian social reform in general. “The history of the Russian temperance movement” may sound like a world’s-shortest-book joke, . . . . Continue Reading »

The biggest difference between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and David Foster Wallace is that by the time cardiomyopathy took Coleridge’s life in 1834, at the age of sixty-one, the consensus was that he had died too late. It’s not that no one engaged in rueful speculation about the . . . . Continue Reading »

I lost my taste for rhapsodies to the power of reading—rhapsodies like Teju Cole’s—around the same time I became a halfway competent reader. It was two months into what would become a twelve-month period of unemployment, and I had come to realize that the reading style that got me through . . . . Continue Reading »

When Yale first bowed to the spirit of meritocracy and began admitting large numbers of students from outside the New England upper class, it set in motion a nationwide arms race among high-achieving high school students. After fifty years of escalating competition, it is no longer enough to have . . . . Continue Reading »

Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from Chicago’s wealthy German Jewish elite, and they read too much Nietzsche and started thinking they were supermen. Loeb, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Australia is an English-speaking country, technically, but as an American immigrant here I sometimes have trouble understanding the locals. (What’s a “galah”? Can you eat it for brekkie?) They, on the other hand, have almost no trouble understanding me, with all the American . . . . Continue Reading »

I don’t know much about the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, except that I read somewhere that he gave his wife Nadezhda a pacifier and persuaded her to wear it around her neck on a string of pearls so that he could stick the pacifier in her mouth whenever she interrupted him, which apparently . . . . Continue Reading »