Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs on Andrew Delbanco’s ‘The War Before the War,’ the horrors of the fugitive slave laws, and the costs of union.

Alan Jacobs on the maps that guide writers and readers through fictional worlds.

Alan Jacobs on how Silicon Valley came to dominate our vision of the future.

Alan Jacobs reviews Edward Tenner’s ‘The Efficiency Paradox.’

The rise of sabermetrics makes rational sense—but it has also made the sport less fun to watch.

It’s World Cup time again. Alan Jacobs on the logic of the world’s most popular sport.

The Book Against God

God's Secretaries

Words to God's Music

I HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY DILIGENT in keeping up with the news from the war in Iraq--some might say a little too diligent. I was the first one on my block to track the Command Post hour by hour, and I recall with a surge of pleasure the first time I got to a juicy story before Glenn Reynolds could…

Private Memoirs and Confessions

The Monk by Matthew Lewis Oxford University Press, 442 pp., $20 THE LONDON STAGE, in the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, fairly swarmed with Spaniards and Italians. There are Antonios and Antonias, Lorenzos, Isabellas, and Claudios beyond counting. Shakespeare gives us both a Borachio and a…

IN RECENT YEARS, "neglected women writers" have been much in vogue, with publishers bringing out series after series of them. Yet Dorothy Osborne, the most remarkable of that company, has been overlooked by literary archaeologists--and it is a scandal that her work is not more widely available.…

In the world of literature for adolescents -- "young adults" as the publishers call them -- fantasy stories have a particular power to inspire loyalty. Think of J.R.R. Tolkien's sagas of Middle Earth, Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books, Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, Madeleine L'Engle's…

Conversations with God

INDIA'S NUCLEAR-WEAPONS testing may have surprised many Americans -- especially the CIA and the Clinton administration -- but for people who remember the early history of the nuclear age there is a natural and immediate association of India with nuclear weapons. When the first mushroom cloud rose…

In Santa Barbara, California, in the English department of an evangelical Christian school called Westmont College, there stands a large piece of furniture that is, visitors are quickly informed, the real wardrobe -- the wardrobe the Pevensie children passed through into Narnia in the first of C.…

D. M. Thomas