December 2018

Continuing with our series of “Best of 2018″ lists curated by the entire Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections...

This is the 14th year that the Year in Reading series has run at The Millions. It’s the third year that I’ve blearily written the introduction to kick off the series the night before it’s set to begin

On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care...

We all hate end-of-year book round-ups. No-one has ever read a single book included in an end-of-year list, especially the people who compile them.

My Dear Susie Clemens, I have received and read all the letters which you and your little sister have written me... I can read your and your baby sister's jagged and fantastic marks without any trouble at all...

‘The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One,’ wrote Albert Einstein in December 1926. ‘I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.’ 

In Bacon’s Studies of the Human Body (1970), a panel pays skewed homage to Caravaggio’s Narcissus or a Narcissus by the Caravaggisti.

What could be more relaxing than to take a holiday? From the start I knew that the word was a bit of a lie, since it wasn’t really a vacation

In the mid-1990s, when I was a student of creative writing, there prevailed a quiet but firm admonition to avoid composing political poems.

I land at Heathrow and am met by my blistered checked-in bags. Somewhere between Muscat and London, Oman Air had managed to transfer our luggage...

The Monkees were about as famous as you could get, with their More of the Monkees album beating out even the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the number one U.S. slot in 1967.

All writing is personal. How could it be otherwise? People spend what is most precious—their lives—doing it.

A baby named Stephen Foster was born, who though white, would grow up harboring the ambition to become the “best Ethiopian songwriter”...