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Knowledge comes into the world by many paths. The Knowledge Machine (subtitled How Irrationality Created Modern Science) has a lot to say about the process by which scientists since the 17th century have created scientific knowledge. The book […]
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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
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It’s the start of the lunar new year, specifically the year of the ox. To celebrate, I decided to make fried dumplings, from a recent recipe in the New York Times. I had to make a visit to […]
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The City of Bones is the first book in a fantasy series by Cassandra Clare, the Shadowhunter series. The book imagines a world in which magical creatures of all sorts exist, but are generally invisible to ordinary humans. […]
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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 1 of a cycle of four books) is about magic and yearning. The main characters, all teenagers of 16 or 17 years, try to solve a magical mystery while they struggle […]
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After working through the beta readers’ comments on the first draft, I solicited another review from someone who hadn’t seen the manuscript before. This isn’t a beta reader exactly. Is there such a thing as a gamma-reader? The […]
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike mystery that unfolds like a rose: first the petals are tightly closed, but as they open one by one, a new flower is revealed. At the start, the protagonist, who narrates […]
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I usually have at least one book I’m reading (or listening to) — often more than one. As I walk around the city or work out in the gym, audiobooks keep me company. And curling up in bed […]
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I cook a lot. And I like cooking. The pandemic hasn’t made me yearn for restaurants or do a lot of takeout (though I do worry about my friends who work in restaurants). I just keep on cooking. […]
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Where do gods come from? Cities have had gods for millennia, but how do the gods of cities come into being? It’s a messy process and, like a turtle egg hatching on the beach, there are always predators […]
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