Not so long ago it seemed as if news about trends in the world of books and book publishing was more often bad news. Borders went under. Barnes and Noble kept closing stores and might go under any year. Big publishers first spent years worrying that the arrival of e-books...

Bay Area baseball fans are lucky in a lot of ways -- as last year's postseason reminded the other coast and everyone in between, Bay Area baseball is the best in the country: The Giants have the best ballpark in the game and a fun, dynamic team that has won...

I love baseball books for the window they offer on life and human nature. I recently stumbled on a baseball book that blew me away -- and ought to be read far and wide.

Back in 2010 a kid pitcher named Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game -- he did....

It's the time of year to be thankful for what's good and hopeful about what is to come, so I will be spending the last day of 2012 and the first days of 2013 quietly hoping for the best when it comes to Hillary Clinton and her health.

Hillary, here's...

Story-telling might not quite be dead in coverage of sports, but it's at least on the endangered-species list. How can anyone dig into telling a story or offering real glimpses of people in sports if they are focused on tweeting every few minutes, or, for that matter, reading tweets?

Sports...

I'll leave to others the debate over whether it's insane to make acquiring assault weapons easy, and related questions, and will also forgo riffing on the numbing, soul-crushing sadness and horror of contemplating the list of twenty names and their ages.

I'd like simply to check in with a word...

Baseball's winter meetings are a bizarre spectacle, a lot of people standing around chasing rumors with not much going on much of the time, which was why it was a big deal when super-agent Scott Boras chose the occasion to talk up the idea of the A's moving...

A lot of my favorite books, from Lucky Jim by Kinglsley Amis to just about everything Chris Buckley has ever published, make great sport of withering satire, but I'm starting to wonder: Is satire dead?

How can satire be a weapon to change minds when no one pays close enough...

The San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals wrapped up a series of games in the National League Championship Series last night with both teams seeking to portray their performance in the most favorable light.

Picking up where they left off in Game 6 of the Series, the Giants had...

As Chris McDougall explains in Born to Run, the three great U.S. running booms have all coincided with economic downturns: the first came during the Great Depression, the second starting in the early 1970s, and the most recent started the year after September 11th. This third running boom has also...

Author Gitta Sereny, a brilliant interviewer who brought three-dimensional insight into even the most sinister subjects, died at age 91 earlier this month in Cambridge, England, and it's worth pausing to honor her lifelong inquiry into the Holocaust -- and the question of how such monstrous acts were even possible.

The Occupy movement was supposed to have resulted in a fundamental reassessment of the notion, erroneously thought to have long been central to U.S. self-identity, that ours was a system of and for big money, in short, that a juiced-up, out-of-hand, shameless greed was the point of existence.

What a...

Longtime Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan's new book Search Inside Yourself, with the subtitle, "The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)," is based on a program of the same name the author helped implement at Google.

The concept sounds simple, but is actually quite radical: What...

Count me among those who would much rather hold a book in my hand as I read, pen at the ready, rather than clicking through glowing text on a screen. My idea of a satisfying reading experience is leaving a book I've been crazy about with notes and underlines, down-turned...

It's often been remarked that few spectacles are sadder and more squalid than that of the once-robust professional athlete not knowing when to hang it up and stop competing.

Jose Canseco, once the hottest player in the game of baseball, American League MVP and celebrity (once taunted on the cover...

Few things are worse for books than reviewers who pull their punches and ask readers to wade through the lukewarm sludge of a bland, boring, fair-to-a-fault review when, reading between the lines, you just KNOW the reviewer wanted to carve up the book in question.

Good news, then, to...

It says a lot about the state of U.S. attitudes toward Europe when a major Republican presidential candidate's idea of an insult worthy of a paid political attack ad is: "Just like John Kerry, he speaks French, too!"

We really have not come so far from the "Freedom...

For those who have ever lived in San Francisco or just wished they lived there, the books of Armistead Maupin have long been well known as a guilty pleasure, such fun to read it almost hurts. Turning for the first time to one of the books between covers,...

I was startled Friday to see George Vecsey posting his last regular column for the New York Times sports section. I had assumed that Vecsey would just keep writing columns forever, since that's what I wanted as a reader. He pledges to contribute at least the occasional column...

It's accepted as a given in publishing that book reviews do not matter the way they once did, and that the New York Times Book Review has lost at least some of its status as the central arbiter of importance and quality.

What do you think? Do you read the...