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10:19 AM, May 21, 2011 • By MICHAEL MOYNIHAN

Is there anything more irritating than that predictable sigh, so often heard from the trendy anti-gentrification crowd, that New York was so much better, so much more authentic, when one couldn’t walk through Central Park without fear of sexual molestation; when Times Square was an outdoor brothel, controlled by illiterate gangsters who kept out both horrid corporations and those even more horrid (and uncool) tourists from Omaha?

Book recommendations from the staff of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

12:03 PM, Apr 30, 2011 • By THE WEEKLY STANDARD

One of these days when Hollywood needs a break from the superhero genre, they're going to make comic book movies out of Greg Rucka's fantastic Queen & Country books. Based on a small British MI6 team of agents, Queen & Country might be the most realistic spy series done in the last 20 years: The agents spend most of their time sitting around, waiting for something to happen.

11:36 AM, Apr 26, 2011 • By KATHERINE EASTLAND

Who doesn’t love an animal logo? Allen Lane knew that, in 1935, when he published the first 10 Penguin books in London. The six pence paperbacks arrived in bookshops sporting the avian logo and no other graphics, just broad bands of color at the top and bottom. General fiction had orange bands; crime fiction, green; biography, dark blue. The uniform cover font was Gill Sans-Serif.

3:00 PM, Apr 16, 2011 • By EMILY SCHULTHEIS

Almost anyone who went to a high school in the United States has probably read Lord of the Flies. But very few have read anything else by William Golding.

‘For the Happiness of Our People’ (1949) by Dimitri Nalbandyan

A definition of genocide that makes sense of history.

Apr 4, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 28 • By AARON ROTHSTEIN

Stalin’s Genocides

by Norman Naimark

Echoes of Africa in the words of an American master.

Apr 4, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 28 • By FRANKLIN FREEMAN

African Culture and Melville’s Art

The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby Dick

The mortal implications of man’s place in nature.

Apr 4, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 28 • By LAWRENCE KLEPP

The Immortalization Commission Science and the Strange Quest

to Cheat Death

by John Gray

The strange case of Dr. Dodgson and Mr. Carroll.

Apr 4, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 28 • By JOSEPH BOTTUM

The Alice Behind Wonderland

by Simon Winchester

Socializing with David Brooks

6:00 PM, Mar 17, 2011 • By MATT KATZENBERGER

If you want to see how liberals age, visit Washington D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose. Conservative columnist David Brooks braved the crowd there Wednesday tonight, touting his latest book, The Social Animal. Brooks’ favored-son status among the liberal intelligentsia slightly diminishes the heroism of his trip, though tensions did rise when he praised Reagan’s economic revolution.

Juan Diego Florez and Andrew Ferguson.

10:27 AM, Feb 28, 2011 • By WILLIAM KRISTOL

Two memorable events in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon: a recital at the Kennedy Center by the spectacular Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Florez; and a book party at a home in Northwest D.C. for the spectacular American author, our own Andrew Ferguson.

Washington Post on Ferguson's 'Crazy U': 'Hilarious' and 'Incisive'

4:00 PM, Feb 25, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY

The Washington Post has a review up of the new book by Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The new book, Crazy U, tells the story of Ferguson's struggles getting his son through the college admissions process.

Ferguson's regular readers are unlikely to be surprised by this, but the Post's nonfiction editor gave Crazy U a rave review:

Betting on the Nobel Prize for Literature

Forecasting the Prize is less like handicapping the ponies than shooting craps, so let the dice roll.

2:55 PM, Oct 6, 2010 • By LEE SMITH

Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the opinions of gamblers, most of whom are rather like the horseplayers who bet their favorite number or color of the jockey’s silks. That is to say, they’re suckers.

A day in the life of Fareed Zakaria.

1:31 PM, Sep 29, 2010 • By PHILIP TERZIAN

This week's Fareed Zakaria quotation comes courtesy of Cindy Adams, who interviewed the great man in her New York Post column (Sept. 27) about how he manages to find the time to do the innumerable extraordinary things he does. Answer: He doesn't have the time.