Journalist Bianca Bosker infiltrated the world of contemporary art and wrote about it in her book Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See (Bookshop|Amazon), often with...
German filmmaker Werner Herzog is known for such documentaries as Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo. He’s also fascinated with what he calls “the limits of language,” as evident in his 1976 documentary how fast auctioneers can talk, How...
Acclaimed Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair’s sumptuous memoir, How to Say Babylon (Bookshop|Amazon) tells the story of her struggle to break free from a rigid Rastafarian upbringing, and how her discovery of poetry, both memorizing it and writing...
Grant and his son are reading two series of books by Brandon Sanderson, his Stormlight Archive (Bookshop|Amazon) and the Mistborn Saga (Bookshop|Amazon). He’s also reading Rebecca Ross’s duology, A River Enchanted (Bookshop|Amazon) and A...
Crosswordese: A Guide to the Weird and Wonderful Language of Crossword Puzzles (Bookshop|Amazon) by puzzle constructor David Bukszpan is a cruciverbalist’s delight, full of crossword lore and puzzle-solving tips, plus a dozen puzzles that...
Crossword puzzles are great mental exercise, partly because they’re less about how much you know and more about whether you can think creatively about what you already know. For example, what’s the three-letter answer to the clue It has...