What I read in 2009

In 2009 I accomplished something in my life as a reader that I had never before accomplished: I kept a list — I’m talking about a full list — of everything I read. Not just books, but short fiction, poetry, and — in the most gargantuan category of all — articles, essays, and reviews. I figured it would prove a helpful exercise in self-reflection for me to have available at a glance the full scope of my reading activities for a given calendar year.

Of course, there are omissions. Specifically, I chose to leave out several hundred, or it may have been several thousand, articles and reports that I read in the course of my pro blogging pursuits. I just didn’t feel led to note down all of those items related to health reform, home healthcare, industrial HVAC, green building, etc., that I was obliged to research for my clients. The reading list below consists of things I read by choice, not out of necessity.

In an interesting development, by the time June arrived I found that I was approaching all of my reading with the thought of the list hanging in the back of my head. At times I even found myself involuntarily judging whether or not to read something by whether or not I thought it would look good on the list. Fortunately, I managed to recognize and squash that idiocy fairly quickly.

Note that I’m embarrassed at the ridiculous stuntedness of the poetry section and the complete absence of a drama section. Also note that I read far more short fiction that what appears in the section labeled as such, since eight of the books that I read in full or in part were short fiction collections.

Finally, I’ll point out that for my own future reference, I frequently included bracketed snippets of what each piece was about in the listing of essays and articles etc., since many of the titles didn’t do the trick on their own.

I sometimes enjoy reading other people’s end-of-the-year reading lists. I hope you’ll enjoy this one. I probably won’t do it again in 2010, or at least not in such detail. Too much work.

My 2009 reading list

BOOKS read in full:

• Brian Evenson, Last Days (1998)
• Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (2004; 1993)
• Nick Mamatas, Move Underground (2004)
• —, You Might Sleep (2009)
• Mark Samuels, Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes (2008)
• Michael Shea, I, Said the Fly, in The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989)
• Douglas Smith, Impossibilia (2008)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
• Simon Strantzas, Beneath the Surface (2008)
• Donald N. Wood, Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility (1996)

BOOKS read in significant excerpts:

• Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007)
• Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (2002)
• Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (2008)
• Donald F. Glut, The Dracula Book (1975)
• Anthony Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire (1972)
• Raymond T. McNally, ed.,  A Clutch of Vampires (1974)
• Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires (1994, revised edition)
• Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (1965 [1952])
• James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (1985)
• —, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (1981)
• T.M. Wright, Bone Soup (2009)

SHORT FICTION

• Elizabeth Bear, “Shoggoths in Bloom” (2008)
• George Bernanos, excerpt from The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), in The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark” (1843)
• —, “Young Goodman Brown” (1834)
• John Langan, “On Skua Island” (2001)
• —, “Mr. Gaunt” (2002)
• Brian Keene, “Burying Betsy” (2009)
• Stephen King, “Crouch End” (1980)
• Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost” (1941)
• Thomas Ligotti, “Purity” (2003)
• —, “The Town Manager” (2003)
• Paul Melniczek, “The Watching” (2009)
• Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)

POETRY

• William Ernest Henley, “Invictus” (1875)
• John Keats, “On Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816)
• Dylan Thomas, “Poem in October” (1945)
• David Wagoner, “Lost”

ARTICLES, ESSAYS, and REVIEWS

• Joan Acocella, “In the Blood,” The New Yorker online, March 16, 2009  [“Why do vampires still thrill?”]
• Benjamin Anastas, “The Final Days,” The New York Times Magazine online, July 21, 2007 [Investigative summary of 2012 cultural meme with profiles of its leading exponents]
• Sam Anderson, “In Defense of Distraction,” New York Magazine online, May 17, 2009
• Steve Andrews, “Interview with Bob Hirsch – The Stonewalling of Peak Oil,” Peak Oil Review, September 7, 2009
• Sharon Astyk, “As You Go Out into the World,” Casaubon’s Book, May 15, 2009 [A hypothetical college commencement address]
• Anthony Aveni, “Apocalypse Soon?” Archaeology online 62:6 (Nov./Dec. 2009) [Skeptical take by an astronomer and anthropologist on “What the Maya calendar really tells us about 2012 and the end of time”]
• Nicholas Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?” The New Yorker online, Aug. 3, 2009
• Bob Banner, “Peak Ego and the Ego Descent Plan,” HopeDance, October 25, 2009 [“Peak everything might just shake up everything and the struggle to maintain ones egoic posture might just explode or at least peak—demanding that we are ‘entitled’ to the life style that we have grown accustomed due to cheap oil and cheap everything.”]
• David P. Barash, “We Are All Madoffs,” The Chronicle Review online, Aug. 31, 2009 [“Our relationship to the natural world is a Ponzi scheme”]
• Interview with Laird Barron, SF Signal, September 2009
• Mark Bauerlein, “Technology and the Seduction of Revolution,” The Chronicle Review online, August 29, 2009
• Mark Bauerlein, “Dimishing Returns in Humanities Research,” The Chronicle Review online, July 24, 2009
• Mark Bauerlein, “Cultural Literacy in Retreat,” The Chronicle Review online, June 9, 2009
• Mark Bauerlein, “The Underestimation of Cultural Literacy,” The Chronicle Review online, June 8, 2009
• Drake Bennett, “Thinking literally,” The Boston Globe, September 27, 2009 [“By taking everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us.”]
• Thomas H. Benton, “Online Learning: Reaching Out to the Skeptics.” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, September 18, 2009
• Bono, “Rebranding America,” The New York Times online, October 17, 2009 [“The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.”]
• Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, “The Next Financial Crisis,” The New Republic online, September 8, 2009 [“It’s coming. And we just made it worse.”]
• Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, “The Recession Is Over—for Now,” The New York Times online, September 19, 2009 [Shorter version of “The Next Financial Crisis,” above]
• Alain de Botton, “For a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism,” Financial Times online, April 30, 2009
• James Bradley, “Bloody beauties,” The Australian online, July 1, 2009 [How the current pop culture vampire craze is a just a continuation of an ancient cultural trend]
• Russell Brain, “Some Thoughts on Genius,” in Some Reflections on Genius and other essays, 1960
• Ibid., “Symbol and Image”
• Robert Roy Britt, “Die, Humans! Is Mother Nature Sick of Us?” LiveScience, May 7, 2009
• Pat Buchanan, “Traditional Americans are losing their nation,” WorldNetDaily, October 20, 2009
• Brad Buchholz, “Author warns of pageantry’s perils,” Austin American-Statesman online, December 5, 2009 [Excerpts from a talk given by Chris Hedges at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin. “Chris Hedges, who wrote ‘Empire of Illusion,’ examines America’s identity crisis in an age of consumerism and spectacle.”
• M. M. Carlson, “What Stoker Saw: An Introduction to the History of the Literary Vampire,” Folklore Forum Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall 1977)
• Edward Carr, “The Last Days of the Polymath,” More Intelligent Life, (website of Intelligent Life magazine), September 25, 2009 [How and why true polymaths of the classic awe-inspiring type are an endangered species]
• Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, “The Rural Brain Drain,” The Chronicle Review online, September 21, 2009
• Jamais Cascio, “Get Smarter,” The Atlantic online, July/August 2009 [In our current round of civilization-altering problems, “This time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?”]
• Brian Cathcart, “Is Google Killing General Knowledge?” Intelligent Life online, Summer 2009
• Stephen L. Carter, “Where’s the Bailout for Publishing?” The Daily Beast, March 17, 2009
• Dominic Cavendish, “Wallace Shawn: philosopher with a writer’s bent,” The Telegraph online, May 18, 2009
• Dave Cohen, “2009 – A Year We Will Live to Regret,” ASPO-USA, December 17, 2009 [The collusion between government and the financial industry to prevent meaningful changes being made to our dysfunctional financial-economic system in 2009 will inevitably result in further disaster and suffering.]
• Rachel Cook, “The Demons that Drove John Cheever,” The Guardian online, October 17, 2009
• Robert P. Crease, “‘Two cultures’ turns 50,” Physics World online, May 1, 2009
• Laura Crimaldi, “Books face extinction as schools go high tech-tech,” The Boston Herald, September 14, 2009
• Jessica Crispin, “God’s Words: The unnecessary rise of the spiritual memoir,” The Smart Set, September 24, 2008
• Jordan David, “Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis’s Narnia,” The Nation online, May 6, 2009
• Michelle R. Davis and Katie Ash, “Swine-Flu Plans Put E-Learning in the Spotlight,” Education Week online, September 25, 2009
• Daniel de Vise, “Funding Cuts Leave Area Colleges Gasping,” The Washington Post online, September 12, 2009 [“Crammed classes, higher tuition the norm”]
• Paul Dukes, “Dracula: Fact, Legend, and Fiction,” History Today, July 1982
• Roger Ebert, review of Collapse, Chicago Sun-Times online, December 9, 2009 [The movie forcefully awakened Ebert to peak oil: “If this man is correct, then you may be reading the most important story in today’s paper. . . . I don’t know when I’ve seen a thriller more frightening.”]
• David Edmonds, “The Age of Enhancement,” Prospect Magazine online, Issue 162 (September 3, 2009) [“A cornucopia of drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything fropm our memories to our trust in others.”]
• Mark Edmundson, “Against Readings,” The Chronicle Review online, April 24, 2009
• Sarah Anne Edwards, Ph.D., foreword to Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse by Carolyn Baker (2009)
• Peter A. Facione, “A Straight-Talk Survival Guide for Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, March 20, 2009
• “The Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, July 10, 2009
• Drew Gilpin Faust, “The University’s Crisis of Purpose,” The New York Times online, September 1, 2009 [“Even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility.”]
• Laurie Fendrich, “Bad Student Writing? Not So Fast!” The Chronicle Review online, August 28, 2009
• Laurie Fendrich, “Please Save This Nation from the Birthers,” The Chronicle Reviewonline, July 28, 2009
• Christopher J. Ferguson, “Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius,” The Chronicle Review online, June 14, 2009
• Niall Ferguson, “Wall Street’s New Gilded Age,” Newsweek online, September 11, 2009 [“A year after the crash, a few financial giants are back to making millions, while average Americans face foreclosure and unemployment. What’s wrong with this picture?”]
• Ronald Foust, “Rite of Passage: The Vampire Tale as Cosmogonic Myth,” in William Coyle, ed., Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film (1986)
• Samuel Francis, “At the Heart of Darkness,” Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture online, September 24, 2009 (originally published in print mag in May 1997) [Fine reflective and interpretive essay on Lovecraft, taking for its launching point Joshi’s biography and Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Writings]
• Thomas Friedman, “The Inflection Is Near,” The New York Times online, March 7, 2009
• Doug Ganley, “‘Atlas Shrugged’ author sees resurgence,” CNN.com, April 27, 2009
• Amanda Gefter, “Top Scientists Predict the Future of Science,” New Scientist online, June 2009
• Adam Geller, “A year after meltdown: Tough questions, choices,” The Associated Press, September 6, 2009
• Etienne Gilson, “The Intelligence in the Service of Christ,” in The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought (1990)
• Ted Gioia, “Notes on Conceptual Fiction,” Conceptual Fiction website, April 2009
• David Glenn, “Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, December 15, 2009 [“There is no strong scientific evidence to support the ‘matching’ idea, [researchers] contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom.”]
• Jonah Goldberg, “Mortal Remains: The wisdom and folly in Albert Jay Nock’s anti-statism,” National Review Online, May 4, 2009
• Stefany Anne Goldberg, “We Are the Martians,” The Smart Set, August 18, 2009
• Lev Grossman, “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” The Wall Street Journal online, Aug. 29, 2009 [“A novelist on the pleasures of reading books that don’t bore; rising up from the supermarket racks”]
• Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Year of Obama,” National Review Onlin, December 30, 2009 [“Obama quite simply believes that those like himself—Ivy League–trained, having spent their lifetimes on government payrolls, untainted by private-enterprise entrepreneurship—not only know best what is good for America, but understand how to implement it through redistributive taxation and vastly expanded entitlements.”]
• Patrick Harpur, “Angels and Daimons,” Fortean Times online, July 2006 [“Stories of guardian angels have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, becoming a staple of fluffy New Age-ism and the subject of countless books. But, argues Patrick Harpur, these mediators between God and man have a long and fascinating history and might not be quite as cuddly as we’ve been led to believe.”]
• Dan Harris and Andrew Sullivan, “New Normal: Is the American Dream Dead – or Just in Hiding?” ABC News online, June 16, 2009
• Kathryn Harrison, “The Symbologist,” The New York Times online, Deember 6, 2009 [Review of Jung’s “Red Book” or Liber Novus]
• Paul Hawken, “Healing or Stealing? You are brilliant and the universe is hiring!” Commencement address to the class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009
• Virginia Heffernan, “Facebook Exodus,” The New York Times magazine online, August 26, 2009
• Friedrich Heiler, “The Essence of Prayer,” Chapter XIII of Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion (1917), in The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought (1990)
• Richard Heinberg, “Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians,” Post Carbon Institute, October 7, 2009 [“There is a task that needs doing: the conservation of essential cultural knowledge in non-digital form.”]
• Richard Heinberg, “Temporary Recession or the End of Economic Growth?” Energy Bulletin, August 8, 2009 [We must begin deliberately preparing for a new way of living on earth, since “dire events having to do with real estate, the derivatives markets, and the auto and airline industries were themselves merely symptoms of an even deeper, systemic dysfunction [namely, the collision of our infinite growth model with ecological limits] that spells the end of economic growth as we have known it.”]
• Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and Victorian Wasteland,” in Peter B. Messent, ed., Literature of the Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays (1981)
• Bob Herbert, “The Scourge Persists,” The New York Times online, September 18, 2009 [“The fact that a black man is now in the White House has so unsettled much of white America that the lid is coming off the racism that had been simmering at dangerously high temperatures all along.”]
• Stephen C. Herbert, “Dracula as Metaphor for Human Evil,” Journal of Religion and Psychical Research Vol. 27, Issue. 2 (April 2004)
• Douglas Hill, “Blood, Sex, and Vampires,” in The History of Ghosts, Vampires, and Werewolves (1973)
• E.D. Hirsch, Jr., “How Schools Fail Democracy,” The Chronicle Review, September 28, 2009 [The American “language gap,” in which a near-majority “cannot wield the conventions of knowledge and language needed to participate in the American public sphere,” is attributable to a faulty national education system that neglects the teaching of a common core of cultural background knowledge in favor of a functional skills approach to reading.]
• Michael Hirschorn, “The Newsweekly’s Last Stand,” The Atlantic online, July/August 2009 (Why The Economist is thriving even as Time and Newsweek fade)
• Larry Hobson, “Community-College Teachers Don’t Need a Ph.D.,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, May 29, 2009
• Maurice Isserman, “3 Days of Peace and Music, 40 Years of Memory,” The Chronicle Review online, August 10, 2009
• John L. Jackson, Jr., “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, August 13, 2009
• John L. Jackson, Jr., “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia, Part 2,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online August 18, 2009
• Tom Jacobs, “This Is Your Brain on Kafka,” Miller-McCune.com, September 16, 2009 [New study in the journal Psychological Science concludes that reading absurdist-type literature with fragmented narratives that require the reader to impose meaning and order actually increases a person’s measurable intelligence]
• Derrick Jensen, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change,” Orion Magazine online, from the July/August 2009 print issue
• Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic Online, May 2009 [Former IMF chief economist explains how the U.S. economic crisis reveals “that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.” Prognosis: not good.]
• S.T. Joshi, Introduction to Barnes & Noble’s  H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (2008)
• Brian Kaller, “Future Perfect: The future is Mayberry, Not Mad Max,” Energy Bulletin, Aug. 25, 2009
• Gary Kamiya, “The Death of the News,” Salon.com, Feb. 17, 2009
• William Kates, “50 years later, ‘Twilight Zone’ bridges time” Yahoo! News (AP), September 29, 2009
• Interview with John A. Keel: “The Great UFO Wave: October 1973,” on the Internet, excerpted from Glen McWayne and David Graham, The New UFO Sightings, 1974 [“Ufology is essentially a new system of belief, not a new system of scientific fact. As such, it is no more substantive than the study of angels and the medieval cataloging of chimeras. Indeed, the deeper one penetrates into the ufological problems, the more he finds himself rediscovering Heraclitus.”]
• Josh Keller, “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, June 15, 2009
• Kevin Kelly (and Sven Birkerts, John Barlow, and Mark Slouka), “The Fate of the Book,” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, July 25, 2008
• G. David Keyworth, “Was the Vampire of the Eighteenth Century a Unique Type of Undead-corpse?” Folklore 117 (December 2006)
• David Keyworth, “The Socio-Religious Beliefs and Nature of the Contemporary Vampire Subculture,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 17, No. 3 (October 2002)
• Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hind, “Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto” (July 2009)
• Adam Kirsch, “Ayn Rand’s Revenge,” The New York Times online, October 29, 2009 [Review essay on Anne C. Heller’s new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before.”]
• Adam Kirsch, “What’s Romantic about Science? When science became a source of sublime terror,” Slate, July 20, 2009 [Review of Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science]
• James Howard Kunstler, “Shattered and Shuttered,” Clusterfuck Nation, June 1, 2009
• John Lahr, “Catnip: Wallace Shawn’s first new play in more than a decade,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009
• Jonah Lehrer, “Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion,” Wired.com, April 20, 2009
• David Leonhardt, “After the Great Recession: An Interview with President Obama,” The New York Times online, April 28, 2009
• Jill Lepore, “The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror,” The New Yorker online, April 27, 2009
• “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to Curriculum,” The Onion online, March 2, 2009
• Ken MacQueen, “Eckhart Tolle vs. God,” Macleans online, October 22, 2009
• Gautam Maik, “Science Spirituality, and Some Mismatched Socks,” The Wall Street Journal online, May 5, 2009
• Kevin Mainey, “The Kindle Problem,” The Atlantic Online, September 15, 2009
• Ben McGrath, “The Dystopians: Bad times are boom times for some,” The New Yorker online, January 2009
• Guy R. McPherson, “Humanity at a crossroads,” Energy Bulletin (and elsewhere), May 21, 2009
• Morgan Meis, “Fear, Trembling, and a Shrug,” The Smart Set, October 11, 2007
• Morgan Meis, “The Heidegger in All of Us,” The Smart Set, December 2, 2009
• Stephen Mihm, “Why capitalism fails,” The Boston Globe online, September 13, 2009 [Hyman Minsky, the “man who saw the meltdown coming, had another troubling insight: It will happen again.”]
• Russell D. Moore, “The Red Cross of Jesus,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Vol. 20, Issue 2 (March 2007)
• Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won,” The New York Times online, December 23, 2009 [“Authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them.”]
• Bill Nichols, “The Christmas classic that almost wasn’t,” USA Today online, December 5, 2005 [The story behind, and reflections on, the making, meaning, and legacy of A Charlie Brown Christmas]
• Maura R. O’Connor, “Awakening to the Blog,” What Is Enlightenment? online, June-August 2005 [Review of and commentary on Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It]
• Caitlin O’Toole, “Upbeat office culture fake and creepy, says Alain de Botton,” news.com.au, April 23, 2009
• W.A. Pannapacker, “Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor,” The Chronicle Review online, October 5, 2009 [Middlebrow culture and its apotheosis on the mid-20^th century Great Books movement “seems a little dull and pretentious but well intentioned, and certainly better than some of the proudly illiterate culture that has taken its place.”]
• Charles P. Pierce, “Greetings from Idiot America,” Esquire online, October 31, 2005 [“Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that. There’s never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it’s getting dangerous.”]
• Lawrence Clark Powell, “The Alchemy of Books,” speech given at the opening General Session of 71st Annual Conference of the American Library Association, Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, New York, June 30, 1952
• Matthew Price, “The end was nigh,” The National Newspaper online, August 20 [Review essay on Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars. “Whether the calamities envisioned by today’s Cassandras will come to pass cannot be determined, but our vivid imagination for disaster has long and deep roots.”]
• Stephen J. Pyne, “History Is Scholarship; It’s Also Literature,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, July 17, 2009
• James Quinn, “Winter’s Coming for the Boomers,” Seeking Alpha, July 13, 2009 [Explication of Strauss and Howe’s theory of the “Fourth Turning,” centering around the idea that America will face a civilization-altering calamity in 10 to 20 years]
• Diane Ravitch, “Critical thinking? You need knowledge,” The Boston Globe online, September 15, 2009
• Motoko Rich, “Curling up with hybrid books, videos included,” The New York Times online, September 30, 2009
• Vincent Rossmeier, “Is the Internet melting our brains?” Salon.com, Sept. 19, 2009 [“No! The author of ‘A Better Pencil’ explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself”]
• Jennifer Ruark, “An Intellectual Movement for the Masses,” The Chronicle Review online, August 3, 2009 [On the founding and fortunes of positive psychology]
• Art Scheck, “Feeling Fake in the Classroom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, September 8, 2009 [“I’m generally confident that writing is a craft that can be learned. I grow less confident that it is a craft that can be taught.”]
• Nathan Schneider, “Far Out: Where went the ancient astronauts?” The Smart Set, October 28, 2008
• Roger Scruton, “Can virtual life take over from real life?” The Times Online, November 16, 2008
• Roger Scruton, “Farewell to Judgment,” The American Spectator online, June 2009
• Robert Sheaffer, “UFOlogy 2009: A Six-Decade Perspective,” Skeptical Inquirer online, January-February 2009 [The UFO movement has gone through several distinct phases and makeovers. We’re presently due for a new one.]
• Amity Shlaes, “Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging with a Growing Load,” Bloomberg.com, June 2, 2009 [Contemporary economic and political realities are mirroring many of Rand’s predictions in Atlas Shrugged]
• Louis Shores, “How to Find Time to Read” published in 1952 in The Wonderful World of Reading and widely reprinted ever since
• Philip A. Shreffler, “H.P. Lovecraft and an American Literary Tradition,” in Peter B. Messent, ed., Literature of the Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays (1981)
• Lee Siegel, “Where Have All the Muses Gone?” The Wall Street Journal online, May 16, 2009
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Beauty Will Save the World” (Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970), in The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought (1990)
• Michael Spencer, “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” Intermonk, January 27-9, 2009
• Sol Stern, “E.D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy,” City Journal 19.4 online, Autumn 2009
• Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth,” The Atlantic online, June 2006 [On the inglorious birth and overblown history of business management theory]
• Amy Sullivan, “Christian Group Launches New Attack on Christmas Commercialism,” Time online, December 15, 2009 [“Instead of critiquing the values of the consumer marketplace, many conservative Christians have embraced it as the battleground they seek to reclaim. A movement like the Advent Conspiracy is countercultural on two fronts — not just fighting the secular idea that Christmas is a month-long shopping and decorating ritual, but the powerful conservative notion that the holiday requires acknowledgement from the nation’s retailers to be truly meaningful.”]
• Andrew Sullivan, “Whose Country?” The Daily Dish, The Atlantic online, October 21, 2009 [“This ‘country’ that white Americans are allegedly losing [according to Pat Buchanan in ‘Traditional Americans are losing their country,’ q.v.]  is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.”]
• Zephyr Teachout, “Welcome to Yahoo! U.,” The Big Money (also printed at The Washington Post online), September 8, 2009 [“The Web will dismember colleges, just like newspapers”]
• Tim Teeman, “Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the U.S.,'” Times Online, September 30, 2009
• Ben Terris, “Scholars Nostalgic for the Old South Study the Virtues of Secession, Quietly,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, December 6, 2009 [“To avoid being tagged as racist, professors retreat to the Abbeville Institute to study the virtues of secession.”]
• Bob Thompson, “At BookExpo America, the Future Is Digital,” The Washington Post online, June 1, 2009 [“The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it.”]
• Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” Wired magazine online, August 24, 2009
• Cathy A. Trower, “Rethinking Tenure for the Next Generation,” The Chronicle Review online, September 7, 2009
• David L.Ulin, “The lost art of reading,” The Los Angeles Times online, August 9, 2009
• John Michael Varese, “Why are we still reading Dickens?” The Guardian online, September 4, 2009 [“We need to read Dickens’s novels because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”]
• S.L. Varnado, “The Idea of the Numinous in Gothic Literature” (1974), in Peter B. Messent, ed., Literature of the Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays (1981)
• Gaia Vince, “How to survive the coming century,” New Scientist online, Feb. 25, 2009
• Nicholas Wade, “The Evolution of the God Gene,” The New York Times online, November 14, 2009
• Damien G. Walter, “Machen is the forgotten father of weird fiction,” The Guardian online, September 29, 2009 [“Arthur Machen might be little read today, but his ideas lie at the heart of modern horror writers Stephen King and Clive Barker”]
• Patrick Welsh, “A School That’s High on ‘Technolust,’ Not Teaching,” USA Today online, February 17, 2008
• Patrick Welsh, “Txting away ur education,” USA Today online, June 23, 2009
• John Williams, “Depression Special Report,” Shadowstats.com, August 1, 2009
• Chris Wilson, “Roll Over, Beethoven,” Slate.com, October 29, 2009 [How the AvantGrand, Yamaha’s new digital grand piano, improves on the original 300-year-old instrument]
• Tom Wolfe, “A Giant Leap to Nowhere,” The New York Times online, July 18, 2009 [The American space program died the minute Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. NASA has been treading water with a series of orbital projects ever since. The agency’s “true destiny” is “to build [a] bridge to the stars,” but that can’t happen until NASA learns to harness the power of “the Word,” the meaning-making power of the mythic imagination.]
• Richard Wolin, “Reason vs. Faith: The Battle Continues,” The Chronicle Review online, June 15, 2009
• Grace Wong, “Brain scans gauge horror flick fear factor,” CNN.com, October 1, 2009
• Robert Wright, “One World, Under God,” The Atlantic online, April 2009
• Father Alexey Young, “UFO’s: The Shattering Assault,” ConspiracyArchive.com, reprinted from Orthodoxy America 9:8 (Issue 88), March 1989 [Argument by an Orthodox priest for the idea that the modern rash of UFO sightings and alien abductions a la Whitley Streiber’s Communion actually involves demonic spirits that have been known to Christians for two millennia.]
• Jeffrey R. Young, “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, July 24, 2009
• Toby Young, “The Noughties: a fond(ish) farewell,” Telegraph online, December 11, 2009 [“For the first 10 years of the 21st century, mankind was in the grip of a fever dream in which they saw their world destroyed over and over again.”]
• Rachel Zoll, “Religious life won’t be the same after downturn,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch online, September 29, 2009 [Economic crisis is having severe effect on economic health of U.S. religious organizations]