‘Eat the City,’ a Foodie’s Guide to Producing in an Urban Environment

In the modern foodie scene, it’s all about local, organic, farm-to-table dining. For the average New Yorker, however, sourcing local meals is likely a matter of discovering a farm upstate or a vegetable garden somewhere else around the tristate area.

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But as Manhattan-based journalist Robin Shulman demonstrates in her enlightening new book, Eat the City, which we called “a feast for foodies of all persuasions,” there’s a thriving culture of urban food production all over the city, including vegetable farming, honey harvesting, butchery and brewing. Here, Shulman discussed the genesis of ...

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Traversing the Salt Marsh with Charles Seabrook

In The World of the Salt Marsh, Charles Seabrook, an environmental writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other publications, explores one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet—the salt marsh along the Southeast coast of the United States.

Home to a diverse blend of flora and fauna, the salt marsh constitutes a vital area between the land and the sea, but real estate development and pollution are threatening large swaths of the salt marsh across South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

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Here, Seabrook discusses his upbringing along the salt marsh, the ...

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The Dirty Business of College Football

For nearly two decades, sports agent Josh Luchs pursued the biggest stars in college football, hoping to land them as clients before each year’s NFL draft.

Beginning as a teen, Luchs learned early on that many of the most sought-after players chose their agents based on money, cars and other illegal benefits. So he fell in line, arranging payments for players and working efficiently within the murky gray areas in which many agents operate.

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In his new book, Illegal Procedure—which we called a “troubling, entertaining indictment of the hypocrisy of ...

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Brooke Gladstone on the Media

For more than a decade, journalist Brooke Gladstone has investigated the latest media trends on her NPR show On the Media. In June she published The Influencing Machine, with illustrations by Josh Neufeld, the author of A.D.: Katrina After the Deluge. Gladstone’s book earned a star and was named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2011. In an e-mail exchange, the author discusses the current state of the media and offers advice for news consumers in this chaotic time.

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I think the graphic format works extremely well for this book. Why ...

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Jackass’ Steve-O: ‘Professional Idiot’

Even though the TV show aired for only three seasons, Jackass became a pop-culture phenomenon in the early 2000s, spawning a handful of spinoff series and three movies, the last of which was released last year in 3D. Along with Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera and crew, Steve-O, or Stephen Glover, subjected himself to countless dangerous stunts and asinine antics, all in the service of cheap laughs.

But along with broken bones and split lips, Steve-O picked up a debilitating substance-abuse problem on the road to stardom. In his new memoir, Professional Idiot, he chronicles his life story and comes clean ...

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In the Kitchen of the Best Restaurant in the World

In The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, Lisa Abend, Time magazine’s correspondent in Spain, documents the life of arguably the most acclaimed chef in the world, the Catalan master Ferran Adrià. The author follows 35 of the chef’s stagiaires (unpaid apprentices) in the kitchen of elBulli, Adrià’s restaurant in Roses, Spain, which has been named the best restaurant in the world five times by Restaurant magazine. In a book that Kirkus called a “slow-motion gastronomical feast and a rare chance for gourmet enthusiasts to witness the creative process behind some of the world’s most innovative cuisine,” Abend gives ...

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2010 Best Books: Ed Vulliamy

For years, Ed Vulliamy traveled along the U.S./Mexican border, observing the widespread violence among the warring narcotraficantes and filing heartbreaking stories about the thousands of people caught in the crossfire. In 2006, the former Guardian and Observer international correspondent left his job to pursue the story full time. The result is the author’s revelatory second book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline, which Kirkus called an “impressively rendered, nightmare-inducing account.” Vulliamy spoke to us about the many narratives he pursued during his travels.

How did you become interested in the border debate?

I was a U.S. correspondent ...

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