Bleak. That's always been the rap against American novelist Richard Yates. Though he has been celebrated as a writer's writer and a consummate craftsman since his death in 1992, even his admirers found his work depressing. Fellow novelist Carolyn See explained it in 1981: "He's not going to get the recognition he truly deserves because to read Yates is as painful as getting all your teeth filed down to the gum with no anesthetic." Joyce Carol Oates agreed, writing in ...

Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes? How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs. Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The ...

Correction Appended: December 11, 2007 It started in earnest a couple of weeks ago when Hillary Clinton questioned how much Barack Obama's time spent living in Indonesia as a child could actually help him make foreign policy decisions as a commander-in-chief. "Voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next President will face," Clinton said November 20 in Shenandoah, Iowa. "I think we need ...

Erica Jong knows something about love, especially its sexy side. Her first novel, Fear of Flying, electrified the literary community in 1971 with its frank sexuality and passion. The public was seduced: the book has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, and was translated into 37 languages. Many books later, and now the grandmother of three, Jong has returned to her original calling, poetry, in her compelling new volume of poems, Love Comes First. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs reached the author at her Manhattan home: ...

Two hundred years after his birth in a log cabin in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate. His moral clarity, his extraordinary gifts with language, his decisive role in preserving the Union and what some consider his ultimate martyrdom combine to make of Lincoln a mythic figure with a firm hold on our collective imagination. In conjunction with the bicentennial of his birth, a slew of new books on the 16th U.S. president have appeared. Among the best-reviewed is ...

"Sesame Street" may not be a real place, but tell that to some of the people Michael Davis met when researching and talking about his new book, "Street Gang." "I met a lot of people who I worked with in New York or got to know in New York -- transplants -- who said to me, 'When I first arrived here in New York, I had this strange desire to find Sesame Street,' " he said. Well, to paraphrase the ...

Leading Republicans warned Sunday that the Obama administration's $800 billion-plus economic stimulus effort will lead to what one called a "financial disaster." "Everybody on the street in America understands that," said Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. "This is not the right road to go. We'll pay dearly." Shelby, of Alabama, told CNN's "State of the Union" that the package and efforts to shore up the struggling banking system will put the United States on ...