David Need

If the counterculture in America has its seminal moments, one of them is the three-week period in April 1951 when Jack Kerouac typed a version of what would be published in 1957 as On the Road. Part of that manuscript–a single continuous text nearly 120 feet long, typed margin to margin without paragraphs on long […]

Imagine how many times you drive past something interesting without even knowing it. On quiet suburban hillside streets south of Business 40 in Winston-Salem, you find neighborhoods of modest family houses as you do throughout the South. And you’d no doubt drive past William Fields’ house with no more than a glance at the slightly […]

Last August, Clare Britt and Lauren Adams sat in sweltering darkness in the back of a converted bread truck as full-color images of Raleigh buildings and streets appeared on a photographic easel. There was no movie projector or video player, only a small pin hole lens punched in the wall of the vehicle through which […]

There’s been exponential growth in interest in Islam after the Sept. 11 tragedies. Academics, think tanks and publishers have rushed to fill bookstore shelves with their studies, each purporting to present the “truth” about the religion. It’s a response to a sudden, desperate need to educate ourselves about a people we’ve hitherto had little interest […]

In 1985, a group of some 250 scholars decided to determine the historical accuracy of the Gospels’ presentations of Jesus. They called themselves The Jesus Seminar, and over the next eight years they met, discussed–and voted–on the authenticity of each of the Gospel passages attributed to Jesus. The goal of this historical criticism was to […]

Chilean writer and Duke Professor Ariel Dorfman’s new collection of poems, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poemsfrom Two languages, explores the human costs of political terror, which range from irreconcilable loss to the guilt and anomie of survivors. The poems in this collection were drawn from several sources, chief […]

Those looking for insight on the Bush administration’s transformation of executive power could do nothing more to horrify themselves than read Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg is the former military analyst who triggered the Watergate crisis by releasing copies of a classified Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making in […]

Poets do not often read at Carnegie Hall. Nor do they often release double-CD sets. But after his New York appearance in April, Jeffery Beam’s current project, What We Have Lost, offers a broad-ranging multimedia retrospective of his work to date. Those who are uneasy with spoken-word CDs should know that What We Have Lost […]