After years of archival research, Lawrence Wright’s long-awaited book on Scientology will be coming out with Knopf this January. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief includes more than two hundred interviews with Scientologists, and will expand on the explosive article Wright published about the religion in the New Yorker.
College students be warned: Digital textbooks can now track whether you’re doing your reading.
“Not surprisingly, Professor Thurston J. Moore gave no final examination”: At the Poetry Foundation, Logan K. Young recalls what it was like to study at Naropa with Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore.
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm writes a follow-up piece to Iphigenia in Forest Hills, in which she returns to Queens to check in on the girl who was then four years old (and is now nine) when her mother was convicted of hiring a hit man to assassinate her husband.
Will the New York Public Library’s flagship building become a “glorified Starbucks”? Architectural critic Paul Goldberger considers the $300 million renovation, and what the Norman Foster redesign might mean for the library.
Terry Eagleton reviews a “superb” new biography of Jacques Derrida, in which he posits that “one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life.”
New Yorkers: Tonight (at PowerHouse Arena) and tomorrow night (at KGB Bar) the writer Lydia Millet—whose novels "touch down on ... lives at critical, transformative moments"—will read from her latest, Magnificence.
