In his 1896 guide to reading, Books & Culture, Hamilton Wright Mabie observed that "To love a book is to invite an intimacy with it which opens the way to its heart …. ...

Geology as a scientific field does metaphorically have an axe to grind and lost ground to possess. It is commonly misunderstood, out of ignorance or disciplinary pride, by the ...

We have all had this moment: someone near us hurdles beyond normal social boundaries, provoking our shock and disbelief and, at some point, fleeting glances to see if there are ...

The "best of times and the worst of times" characterizes the contrast between many private and public institutions of higher learning. This divide was accented recently when Andy ...

Christian Smith is one of the most prolific sociologists of religion in the world. In the 1990s, his research project on American evangelicalism produced multiple award-winning ...

Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels is too long to translate, and too big to write about.

Travelogue, ethnography, architectural and musical guide, dream diary and action drama, ...

The ground beneath our feet can often seem to be the one constant in the human experience. We even use the term "grounded" to describe people who seem to be particularly stable. ...

The essence of travel is putting yourself in a different place—and coming back changed. If you go somewhere and don't come back, you haven't traveled, you have simply moved. ...

Sixty-one years ago, Adrienne Rich's first book, A Change of World, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. W. H. Auden selected it—he later also would introduce such ...

Just as James Madison has often labored in Thomas Jefferson's historical shadow, so James Monroe has labored in Madison's. Founding Rivals examines Madison and Monroe's fascinating ...

In Why Geology Matters, Doug MacDougall recounts the earth's geological record, and the science that has lead to understanding the processes that shape our world. It quickly becomes ...

"About one-third of the human brain is devoted to vision," writes neuroscientist David Eagleman in his bestselling book on the brain Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. ...

If getting paid to entertain people is your idea of the good life, then Dick Van Dyke is a lucky man. His very first job—at the age of sixteen—was to present his own ...

When I interview college students, they often complain to me that they are living in a "bubble." There's a Harvard bubble and a Middlebury bubble. There's a Brigham Young Bubble ...

Editor's Note: At the beginning of this new year, we are introducing a web-exclusive series of weekly pieces on science. Each month, we will focus on a particular book (or article ...

In one sketch from last year's TV show Portlandia, a satire of the West Coast hipster life, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen play a dumpster-diving couple who've gone just a ...

In mid-September 2011, a conference entitled "Heaven on Earth? The Future of Spiritual Interpretation" convened at Regent College in Vancouver, cosponsored by The Center for Catholic-Evangelical ...

Editor's note: Aaron Belz dedicates this poem to Alan Jacobs, whose tweet linking to his blog inspired it.

We invite you to celebrate New Year's Eve 2012 at The Aviary. Doors ...