"It gave focus to their work"

An oral history of Ghostbusters.

The pleasures of neurasthenia

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on reading Thomas Bernhard in New York.

White kid uppers

At the TLS, D. J. Taylor on Wodehouse's early novel Psmith in the City:

What allows Wodehouse to get away with these evasions, it might be argued, is that his comedy is essentially a matter of technique, practically an exercise in pure form, like a clerihew or an Edward Lear limerick. The jokes may rely on questions of status or self-aggrandizement, but at their core generally lies only an extravagant delight in repartee, in language used for no other purpose than to demonstrate the kind of effects of which language is capable.