For an author who has arguably made much of his career out of answering queries that you didn’t know you wanted answers to (how important was salt to the development of human civilization?), Mark Kurlansky has some nerve positing an entire book as one long inquiry. Granted, What? isn’t exactly a tome, at 96 pages it’s the nonfiction equivalent of a novella – the tomette. As macro in focus as his earlier works of nonfiction were monuments of specificity, What? is pleasurable and gamelike, toying with the reader right from the subtitle: Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History – Or Is This a Game of 20 Questions? It doesn’t give anything away to say that question’s not answered.

In 20 short chapters, each focused around a specific interrogative, Kurlansky goes from the obvious journalistic big ones (“How?” “Why?” “What?”) to formulations that appear dashed off at first blush (“What Do We Hate About Children?” “Brooklyn?”) but on further reflection seem more thoughtful, if only slightly – and the answers to those last two, by the way, are: they ask endless questions, and Walt Whitman’s fundamental curiousity.

Numbers lie. How so? Because they always act more innocent than they really are.

As professor of journalism Charles Seife explains in Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, numbers as used in everyday life are accessories to objects, people, money, votes, and everything else that is endlessly shady and complex. This is perhaps better grasped with humor than with respect, and so Seife introduces us to ‘proofiness’, the easily manipulated, fake authority of figures, and its associate ‘randumbness’, the tendency to identify patterns in data where none really exist.

I’ve recently been re-reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the unabridged version, and I’m inclined to go stick my head in the oven, now.

I do not wish to shoot messengers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, here. They clearly did their best to faithfully preserve the rich folktale tradition of their native heath. My question, after re-reading this fine old classic of my childhood—during which its utter lack of suitability for anyone under about age 35 is becoming steadily clearer—is why they thought this was a good idea? Or, perhaps more to the point, just what the hell was going on in those parts, back then?

“God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy,” is the chorus from a song by Billy Currington.

I kept singing this little refrain to myself as I was reading Harry Oliver’s Black Cats and Four-Leaf Clovers: The Origins of Old Wives Tales and Superstitions in Our Everyday Lives. Particularly the part about people being crazy.

Oliver discusses everything from birthstones to wedding traditions to good luck charms in this book. Some superstitions will be familiar to many: the danger of walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror or the idea that cats have nine lives; other superstitions, such as potatoes being able to cure rheumatism or the benefits of hanging seaweed from a fireplace, may be less well-known. Whether familiar or not, almost all will make the reader pause, laugh, or tilt their head in amazed wonder/disbelief at the crazy things humans believe[d].

For three years now I have been expanding my biography of Jack Kerouac originally published in 2005 and reprinted in 2007. This is because I and an assistant, Steve Roux, have been researching tons of unpublished documents of Jack Kerouac at the New York Public Library. This piece of research, however, was done with microfilm and Internet…

In 1932 the Kerouac family had moved yet again to 16 Phebe Avenue in Lowell’s (Massachusetts) Pawtucketville section. It was the address in which Kerouac’s remembrance of his childhood had become keener, more sensorial, and fixated on material objects like the family’s brown desk placed against the wall in the parlor, a room reserved exclusively for company. Beneath the desk were chalk marks made by Jack, Caroline, and the now-dead of Gerard who had passed on at nine-years-old, seven years earlier.