DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability. With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war.

Persons: Sheila Heti, we’ve, Joseph Heller’s “, John Yossarian, Bob Dylan Locations: Vietnam

The bounty of hilarity published in the past 63 years made our task formidable and our criteria painfully limiting; we excluded many worthy nonfiction and short-story specialists. But we settled on a grouping that felt representative of the abundant varieties and evolving tastes of literary humorists, aware that some bits hit different now and others still slay decades later. Let us know what we snubbed, whose good names we’ve insulted with our criminal omissions. We’ll put your picks in a separate roundup — and in our reading queues. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first.

Persons: hilarity, howls, we’ve, We’ll

☆ The Very Busy Writer Telling Everyone to Slow Down
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, by Cal NewportAbout halfway through his new book, “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout,” Cal Newport presents the example of Galileo, whose summertime visits to a villa near Padua gave him a chance to rest and reflect between scientific pursuits. “Once there,” Newport writes, “he would take long walks in the hills and enjoy sleeping in a room ingeniously air-conditioned by a series of ducts that carried in cool air from a nearby cave system.”But that “ingeniously air-conditioned” room also happened to be deadly. The glancing footnote about Galileo’s ailment gestures at something profoundly connected to Newport’s subject: the tension between contingency and control, and the specter of mortality that looms over our preoccupation with productivity and time. But Newport, who writes that the idea for this book came to him during the pandemic, isn’t inclined to explore anything so complicated. For his purposes, Galileo is just another input — an exemplar like any other.

Persons: Cal, Galileo, ” Newport, “, ”, Marie Curie, Lin, Manuel Miranda, Alanis Morissette Organizations: Cal Newport, Newport Locations: Padua, Newport, Philippines

☆ When Violence Was What the Doctor Ordered
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-21 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE REBEL’S CLINIC: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam ShatzRhetoric that is polemical, that is caustic, that is ruthlessly extreme is potent in one sense yet vulnerable in another. It seizes attention and attracts acolytes; it is memorable and therefore memeable. Writers who deploy it are susceptible to being cherry-picked and caricatured. I kept thinking about this paradox while reading “The Rebel’s Clinic,” Adam Shatz’s absorbing new biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He was both a militant and a doctor, someone who promoted a “belief in violence” while also practicing a “commitment to healing.” An acquaintance recalls being struck by Fanon’s compassion: “He treated the torturers by day and the tortured at night.”

Persons: Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz, ” Adam Shatz’s, Fanon, ” Organizations: Rebel’s Clinic Locations: syllabuses, French, Martinique, Bethesda, Md, lynchers, ”, France, Algeria

☆ Living With Fire When It’s Fire Season All Year Round
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-17 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula MartinEven after evacuating her home in Sonoma County, Calif., as wildfires burned nearby, Manjula Martin reflected on her stubborn longing to exempt herself from what was happening. “I wanted to continue to be an exception to the consequences of climate change,” she writes in “The Last Fire Season,” her powerful account of the dry lightning storms of 2020, which ignited an increasingly parched landscape throughout much of Northern California. “But my desire to remain an observer of history instead of its victim was banal,” Martin admits. “The Last Fire Season” includes a moving record of her life as well as a repudiation of all kinds of exceptionalism, not just her own or her country’s. “Humans are not the main characters in the great drama of Earth,” she notes — an inconvenient truth that the extreme weather effects of climate change have made painfully clear.

Persons: Manjula Martin, “, —, ” Martin, ” Locations: Sonoma County, Calif, Northern California

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.

Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, ”, Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine

☆ How American Evangelicalism Became ‘Mister Rogers With a Blowtorch’
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-02 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to. This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States. What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”

Persons: Tim Alberta, “, thrall, Donald Trump, impenitent, Trump, Ted Cruz, Ted, piously, Jesus, Mister Rogers, ” Organizations: THE, Republican, Iowa Republican Locations: “ The, Alberta, United States

☆ A Life of Milton Friedman Seeks the Nuance in His Free-Market Gospel
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer BurnsIn writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. The principles underlying such intricate cooperation were “really very simple,” he said. At the University of Chicago, where Friedman spent most of his teaching life, he edged out the leftist scholars clustered in the Cowles Commission for Economic Research, shrewdly getting the Rockefeller Foundation to pull its funding from the commission and finance Friedman’s workshop instead. Charismatic in the classroom, Friedman didn’t just teach students; he created converts.

Persons: MILTON FRIEDMAN, Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman, Friedman, ”, Burns, fashioning, baldheaded Friedman, Burns —, Ayn Rand —, shrewdly, Friedman didn’t, “, ” Friedman Organizations: Conservative, Newsweek, Productivity, Stanford, University of Chicago, Commission, Economic Research, Rockefeller Foundation

☆ Rose Petals and Peacock Brains: What It Took to Be an ‘Emperor of Rome’
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-25 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

EMPEROR OF ROME: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, by Mary BeardIf social media is to be believed, men can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire, particularly its “alpha male” elements. Anyone similarly obsessed would do well to pick up a copy of “Emperor of Rome,” an erudite and entertaining new book by the redoubtable classics scholar and feminist Mary Beard. The “good” emperors are invariably wise, kind, prudent and generous, while the “bad” ones are dim, disgusting, decadent and miserly. Did Elagabalus really arrange to smother his dinner guests to death by dropping rose petals from the ceiling? Beard encourages us to be skeptical of all the “preposterous anecdotes,” even as she maintains that such demonizing can tell us something about how power works.

Persons: OF, Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome, ”, Beard, Rome ”, Julius Caesar, Alexander Severus, Alexander, Maximinus Thrax, Caligula, Elagabalus Locations: Roman, Roman Republic

☆ Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-09 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback.

Persons: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, ” Walter Isaacson’s, —, ”, ” Isaacson, Musk, Isaacson, Tesla, ” Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Grimes Organizations: ELON, SpaceX Locations: South Africa

☆ When Your ‘Doppelganger’ Becomes a Conspiracy Theorist
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Klein was trapped inside a hall of mirrors, and she was trying to find a way out. Before writing about her doppelgänger, Klein felt stuck. Klein told her what she was going through: “I used to fill notebooks, you know, everywhere I went. As much as Klein recoiled at what Wolf was saying, she also felt the sting of recognition. (In an email, Wolf declined to comment on “Doppelganger,” explaining that she hadn’t yet read the book, but said that some of her tweets “were poorly worded and were deleted.”)

Persons: Klein, Hurricane, ”, Biden, V, Eve Ensler, Harriet Clark, ” Clark, Joan Didion’s “, Covid, “, hadn’t, ” Klein, Philip Roth, Wolf, tweeting, Naomi, Tucker Carlson, nodded Organizations: Rutgers University Locations: New Jersey, British Columbia

☆ How Three Visionaries Expanded Our Understanding of Reality
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William EggintonChances are, if you have ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s powers of memory were so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, even strings of random syllables that were called out to him from the audience. Forgetting something wasn’t a matter of passively letting it slip away into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can begin to resemble “total forgetting.”

Persons: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, William Egginton, Solomon Shereshevsky, ” Locations: Moscow

☆ The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Unlike “Daughter of the Dragon” the film, “Daughter of the Dragon” the book is clearly intended as a form of reclamation and subversion. “Anna May drew attention to or even exploded the stereotype by overacting these roles,” Huang writes, not entirely convincingly. “She has to take what is offered.” Especially when she is an Asian American woman at a time when Asian roles often went to white actors in adhesive tape and yellowface. The Production Code of 1930, which banned onscreen portrayals of miscegenation and interracial relationships, was a “virtual form of foot-binding for Anna May,” Huang writes. (The only film in which she was kissed by a white man was “Java Head,” a British production.)

Persons: Huang, ”, Anna May, ” Huang, Julian Barnes, ” Wong, Wong, — “ Dietrich, Anna, Mary, Mary despaired, Pearl Organizations: Java Locations: ”, Asian American, Hollywood, British, China, yellowface

☆ How Four Female Philosophers Responded to a Dire Decade
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE VISIONARIES: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, by Wolfram Eilenberger. If hell is other people, then so, too, is this world. “Around us other people circled, pleasant, odious or ridiculous: They had no eyes with which to observe me. I alone could see.”It’s a quote that Wolfram Eilenberger uses to potent effect in “The Visionaries,” which traces the lives of four philosophers in the tumultuous decade before 1943. Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand: Each addressed the foundational question of the relationship between the self and others, between “I” and “we,” only to arrive at wildly different conclusions.

Persons: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside, Simone de Beauvoir, Otherness, ”, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand, Eilenberger, ” Arendt, Red Simone Organizations: Dark Times, Magicians, Gestapo Locations: France, Rouen, Berlin, Nazi Germany, Paris, Russian, Hollywood and New York

☆ Why Is It So Darn Hot?
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It’s been hard to escape the feeling this summer that, after years of warnings, climate change is starting to make itself felt in everyday life: Floods, wildfires and deadly heat waves have all made headlines for months, and it looks as if July will be the hottest month ever recorded. In that sense Jeff Goodell’s book “The Heat Will Kill You First” — about the real-world costs and consequences of a warming planet — feels particularly urgent at the moment. On this week’s podcast, Goodell talks with Gilbert Cruz about air conditioning, urban heat traps and the effects of extreme heat on the human body, among other things. “I’ve been working on this book for four years,” Goodell says, “and for it to be out now. It sometimes feels like I’m living in my own Stephen King novel.

Persons: It’s, Jeff Goodell’s, Goodell, Gilbert Cruz, “ I’ve, ” Goodell, Stephen King, ”, Jennifer Szalai, Jeff Goodell “, Jennifer Ackerman “, Emily Monosson

☆ On TV Killer Fungi Are a Horror Plotline. In This Book They’re Real.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

BLIGHT: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, by Emily MonossonThere’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise” in which the protagonist reminisces with an ex-wife who was “ultrasensitive to many things,” as she puts it. “Sunlight, air, food, water, sex,” he says. Monosson’s book takes up the other side. Fungal infections of the skin tend not to be life-threatening; it’s when they invade the blood that they can be lethal. Being warmblooded has provided humans and other mammals with a degree of protection: Most fungi prefer lower temperatures; we run too hot.

Persons: Emily Monosson There’s, Don DeLillo’s, ultrasensitive, ”, Emily Monosson’s, “, Louie Schwartzberg’s, Merlin, Candida auris, warmblooded

☆ Extreme Heat Is Here to Stay. Why Are We Not More Afraid?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-29 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff GoodellHeat, according to the journalist Jeff Goodell, has a branding problem — though unlike the desperate politician whose P.R. flack is on speed dial, heat doesn’t need to be better liked; it isn’t loathed nearly enough. As this terrifying book makes exceptionally clear, thinking we can just crank up the A.C. is a dangerous way to live. This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time. “When it gets too hot, things die,” an agricultural ecologist tells Goodell.

Persons: Jeff Goodell, flack, isn’t, ” Goodell, Goodell, Goodell’s Locations: Texas

☆ Going Bankrupt in the Name of Efficiency
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-21 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

People in favor of private equity will say that the firms serve a crucial function, making troubled businesses more robust and efficient. “Roughly one in five large companies acquired through leveraged buyouts go bankrupt in a decade,” he writes. By 2017, after years of layoffs, crushing debt and being charged regular management fees by the private equity firms “for the privilege to be owned by them,” Ballou writes, Toys “R” Us was bankrupt. Private equity firms have acquired nursing homes, provided staffing for hospitals and services for prisons. And, of course, the cost-cutting measures typically imposed on acquired companies often include slashed wages and abandoned pension obligations.

Persons: Ballou, ”, ” Ballou, Morgenson, Rosner, David Rubenstein, HCR, we’re, ” Rubenstein Organizations: KKR, Bain, Vornado Realty Trust, Carlyle Group, ” Industries

☆ A Book About Owls, in Which Each Species Is a Marvel
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Owls can also carry more negative connotations, depending on the context. In “What an Owl Knows,” Ackerman explains that the “new science” she refers to in her subtitle has required technological innovations: cameras, drones, DNA analysis, satellite transmitters. “Finding owls is hard,” a naturalist and photographer tells Ackerman, stating a simple truth from which many complications follow. Another researcher, who has encountered hundreds of owls, says, “It was still magic to me every time we found one, because they’re so well camouflaged and so shy.” There are some 260 species of owls spread across every continent except Antarctica. But it turns out that the owl’s closest relatives are a group of birds that are active in the daytime, including toucans and woodpeckers.

Persons: Jennifer Ackerman, Athena, Ackerman, ” Ackerman Locations: Serbian, Kikinda, Great

☆ When ‘Regime Change’ Means Returning America to an Idealized Past
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But all the campus adventures amount to so much throat-clearing before he gets to the gravamen of his argument. In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. Deneen spends much of “Regime Change” taking cover in gauzy abstractions, so it’s the occasional blunt-force statement like this that reveals what he would ultimately like to see. There is a lot about “the past” in this book and barely any actual history.

Persons: untutored, ”, Trump, ” Deneen, aristoi, Patrick J, Deneen, Márton, Tocqueville, Aristotle —

☆ Casting a Bright Light on the Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The boy had been asking, “Why?” about a perceived injustice — an order to leave the playground before he was ready. But merits decisions turn out to be “only a small sliver” of the Supreme Court’s output, Vladeck writes. All the soaring rhetoric and painstaking legal analysis amount to little more than 1 percent of the court’s decrees. The shadow docket doesn’t just serve as a neutral realm of routine case management; instead, “the court’s new conservative majority has used obscure procedural orders to shift American jurisprudence to the right.”Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and an analyst at CNN, chronicles how the shadow docket came to be. But it was capital punishment, he says, that really gave rise to the shadow docket as we know it.

☆ Tracing the Angry Path From Timothy McVeigh to Trumpism
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

HOMEGROWN: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, by Jeffrey ToobinIt was the dog whistle heard ’round the world. Along with the standoff at Ruby Ridge, in 1992, Waco became a galvanizing moment for the radical right. Exactly two years later, on the morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder truck loaded with a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Contrary to media portrayals of him at the time, McVeigh wasn’t just some lone-wolf drifter or survivalist oddball. Jeffrey Toobin’s “Homegrown” adds to this chorus, but where those other books contain a chapter on Oklahoma City, the entirety of Toobin’s book is given over to McVeigh and the ensuing trials.

☆ Craving Beauty, but at What Cost?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE UGLY HISTORY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Essays on Desire and Consumption, by Katy KelleherActivities that we tend to think of as distinctly human often have nothing to do with immediate survival. In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher writes about the extreme and sometimes hideous lengths that people have gone to in order to obtain coveted objects of beauty: ruining their health, wrecking the planet, inflicting suffering on others. “I’ve never found an object that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time,” Kelleher writes. A journalist who writes about home and design, she realizes that it has been her job to encourage others to do the same. Kelleher points out that an element of ugliness can be part of an object’s appeal, distinguishing between the intriguingly beautiful and the boringly pretty.

☆ With His Tale of Shipwreck, David Grann Is Steady as He Goes
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE WAGER: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David GrannThere were multiple moments while reading David Grann’s new book, “The Wager,” about an 18th-century shipwreck, when it occurred to me that the kind of nonfiction narratives The New Yorker writer has become known for share something essential with a sturdy ship. A vessel freighted with historical controversy, tangled facts and monomaniacal characters needs to be structurally sound, containing and conveying its messy cargo. It should be resilient yet nimble enough to withstand the unpredictable waters of readers’ attentions and expectations. The men were survivors of the H.M.S. Wager, a British man-of-war that had left England nearly a year and a half before, part of a squadron that had been tasked with capturing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure.

☆ A New York Times book critic says Ron DeSantis' memoir reads like it was 'churned out by ChatGPT'
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-01 | by ( Cheryl Teh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The New York Times' nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai tore into Ron DeSantis' book on Monday. Szalai wrote that DeSantis' new book "reads like a politician's memoir churned out by ChatGPT." Szalai is a full-time book critic and writes weekly book reviews for The Times. The new DeSantis book gives readers a closer look at his life"The Courage to Be Free," a deeper look into DeSantis' life, was released on February 28. I didn't want Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck in our wedding photos," DeSantis wrote.

Search resuls for: "Jennifer Szalai"

25 mentions found