da: The New York Times In her previous books, “Stiff” and a follow-up, “Spook,” Mary Roach set out to make creepy topics (cadavers, the afterlife) fun. In “Bonk,” she turns to sex, covering such territory as dried animal excreta used as vaginal “drying agents”; a rat’s tail “lost” in a penis; and a man named [...]

da: The New York Times After the collapse of Communism, the “new world order” quickly disintegrated into the new world disorder, as pent-up nationalism erupted, most dramatically in the Balkans. The nationalistic volcano subsided, replaced by fears about the “clash of civilizations,” which meant the West against the rest, and primarily Islam. After 9/11, the [...]

There are really two debates going on about the Iraq war, but only one of them is being heard at the present time. Was the decision to invade a mistake from the beginning? For the most part, Democrats say yes and Republicans say no. The other debate centers on the invasion’s aftermath. Is the current [...]

In June 2006, an article appeared in the Modern Love column of this newspaper’s Sunday Styles section, under the headline “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.” The writer, Amy Sutherland, had spent time at a college for animal trainers while researching her book “Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched.” Watching students train baboons, emus, cheetahs [...]

Julie Andrews’s memoir is full of crisp locutions like “poor unfortunate” and “banished to the scullery” and “trivet,” a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as “an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or kettle to stand on.” It opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what [...]

It is surely true that, as Nietzsche observed, “without a constant falsification of life … man could not live.” Our perception of the world rests on a dense trellis of falsehoods that make it possible for us to get out of bed in the morning and face the day. This is part of the huge [...]