Nicholas Mancusi in Time:
Quichotte, the Booker Prize long-listed 14th novel from Salman Rushdie, is pitched as a “Don Quixote for the modern age,” but the book–a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder–is a far more ambitious exercise than mere homage.
The titular character (pronounced Key-shot) was born under a different name, in a city also under a different name: Bombay, now Mumbai. The Indian-immigrant traveling salesman of pharmaceuticals, aging, addled into holy foolishness by a lifetime of TV worship, and recently laid off, bestows the name Quichotte upon himself as a nod to Cervantes’ famous knight, or rather, as a nod to a French opera which was “loosely based” on the book. (“It seems you’re a little loosely based yourself,” Quichotte tells himself, aware that he might be cracking up a bit.)
Under his nom de plume, he embarks on a picaresque mission across America to win over the heart of one Salma R, a beautiful celebrity in New York City whom he knows only through the TV screen. For a squire to ride beside him in his Chevy Cruze, he conjures into being a son, named Sancho.
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This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the brain’s visual system receives very little information from the world itself. Much of what we “see” we conjure in our heads.
All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have been correct. Properties that systematically prevent us from being correct, and for which we can legitimately be blamed, are “intellectual vices.” Examples might include closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, overconfidence, selective attention, and so on. Quassim Cassam is a philosopher who studies knowledge in various forms, and who has recently written a book 
Though earth scientists have yet to agree on the “
I need to know more about Terezin, but I am afraid to go there. It’s only a fifty-minute train ride from Prague. Instead, I search for diaries and I find Gonda Redlich’s, translated from Hebrew into English by the late historian Saul S. Friedman. Gonda is a twenty-six-year-old who headed the children’s department at Terezin for three years and wrote regularly until his deportation to Auschwitz. I read at the office until it closes at eleven. I walk straight home, past roaming groups of drunken tourists, and continue to read in bed.
Stepping into Cole’s, one of the oldest restaurant-bars in Los Angeles, and the self-professed inventor of the French Dip sandwich, feels like stepping back in time to 1908, when the saloon first opened. It’s dimly lit inside, there are old wood-paneled walls, and a long bar greets you upon entry. On a quiet afternoon, you eat your sandwich, maybe have a drink or two, and then chances are you’ll eventually hit the restroom. If you’re in the men’s room, you might notice a bronze plaque bolted to the wall near the stalls: “CHARLES BUKOWSKI PISSED HERE.” People love to take pictures of it. On Instagram, it’s nearly as popular as shots of the sandwich that made Cole’s famous. In 2019, 
A recent article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, “The Case of Al Franken,”
Ambrose finds out he has only weeks to live. How to spend that time is the premise of The End of the Alphabet (2007). It’s a condensed weepie in which Ambrose decides to visit a series of places with his wife that will take them through the alphabet. Somehow Richardson manages to stick to a minimalist elegance which probably saves the book from being schmaltzy book club fodder. And heck, you’d almost look forward to dying the way it’s put. Bucket list: die like this.
As a child, author and poet Annie Dillard would traipse through her neighborhood, searching for ideal places to stash pennies where others might find them. In her novel 
Why do we value successful art works, symphonies, and good bottles of wine? One answer is that they give us an experience that lesser works or merely useful objects cannot provide—an aesthetic experience. But how does an aesthetic experience differ from an ordinary experience? This is one of the central questions in philosophical aesthetics but one that has resisted a clear answer. Although we are all familiar with paradigm cases of aesthetic experience—being overwhelmed by beauty, music that thrills, waves of delight provoked by dialogue in a play, a wine that inspires awe—attempts to precisely define “aesthetic experience” by showing what all such experiences have in common have been less than successful.