Articles by Lianne Habinek
From the Archives: Is There a Doctor in the House?
Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.
A Question, an Answer, and a Death
Cinema lore has it that Jean-Luc Godard read only the first and last three pages of King Lear before making his film adaptation. Lianne Habinek suggests this may have helped him get at the play’s essence.
“Did you en-joy the de-mon-stra-tion?”
Boilerplate traveled the world at the turn of the twentieth century in attempt to dissuade humans from their many wars. Finally, his biography (can such things be?) is revealed, and Lianne Habinek reveals its astonishing contents
Oh Naomi
In her new story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy depicts men and women (but mostly men) who want to eat their cake and have it too. Lianne Habinek tells us how successful these characters, and Meloy, turn out to be.
Mystery Balls
Flotsam and jetsam clutter Javier Calvo’s novel Wonderful World, but do they choke its flow? Lianne Habinek, our steadfast guide, charts its course.
The Crowing of Corncrakes
The Decemberists seem benign enough, but their songs are blood-dimmed with rape, drownings, and even cannibalism. The body count rises on their new release The Hazards of Love, but Lianne Habinek also discovers fresh wellsprings of feeling.
Message in a Klein Bottle
Celebrated young novelist Jesse Ball’s latest, The Way through Doors, twists and pulls at the nature of narrative itself. Lianne Habinek threads the labyrinth.
Who Moved My Charioteer?
In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer tries to anatomize the choosing brain. Lianne Habinek – with an assist from some guy named Plato – anatomizes the anatomizer.
Finely Woven Webs
Poetry meets anatomy when Lianne Habinek reads Donne, who, in “The Flea” and other poems, aimed to discover the seat of the soul
The Wordiness of the Long-Distance Runner
While confabulating postmodern fictions, Haruki Murakami has also been running – first to stay fit, then at grueling length. Contributing editor Lianne Habinek jogs us through his book on the subject, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.
Pinnacle
Lianne Habinek reviews Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs and gives up all the gossip on one of the most strange and successful relationships in music history, the ménage a trois among Glenn Gould, a blind piano tuner, and a one-of-a-kind Steinway concert grand.
Weathering
Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies returns to the scene of the crimes of his debut Safelight, the soul-scarring world of Harlem paramedics. Lianne Habinek rides along through these dark alleys and shows us how Burke achieves dramatic power without dipping into sentimentality.
Beautiful Corpses
In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.
Weirder Than Real: The Films of Michel Gondry
Lianne Habinek forges into the beguiling part-adult, part-childish, part-real, part-dreamlike films of Michel Gondry
Lost in the Verisylum
Lianne Habinek maps the postmodern mazes of Jesse Ball’s maddening, memorable debut novel Samedi the Deafness.
Lab v. Library
Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist attempts to reconcile the ageless turf war between the arts and sciences, but, as Lianne Habinek reports, Lehrer’s propositions may leave both sides feelings shortchanged.
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