David Henkin, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and, with Rebecca McLennan, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014). His newest publication, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are, will appear later this year from Yale University Press.
David Henkin
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Writing on Public Books
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious …
The Big Picture: Jews and Trump
Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of respondents who identified as Jewish cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. For all the attention heaped upon the prospect of Ivanka Trump as the nation’s first […]
Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot device, from the Book of Esther to Fight Club. But what seems strikingly timely about the sleeplessness imagined by Karen Russell’s novella Sleep […]
Songs of Myself
Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, wants badly to compose a pop song. Having already purchased a guitar, lessons, a 49-key MIDI keyboard, Logic music software, and a $700 stereophonic microphone, Chowder consults an e-book that promises to help him write lyrics through a series of mental diving exercises. Early […]
Dollars and Sex
House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s celebrated return to dirty fiction, conjures an alternate sexual universe, where a broad range of heterosexual men and women (and one detached male body part) find deep, gushing satisfaction with one another, largely unconstrained by the anxieties, frustrations, and misunderstandings that bedevil modern sexuality. Slipping out of their unfulfilling lives […]
