This week in the Phoenix, Adam Reilly profiles "atheist superstar" Greg Epstein, Harvard's Humanist chaplain and the author of Good Without God: What A Million Nonreligious People Do Believe. What separates Epstein from the best-selling crop of "new atheists" -- The Atlantic's James Parker profiled the Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris crowd for us in 2007 -- is his insistence on defining atheism as a denominational entity with a spiritual, if not holy, mission: "He dreams not of decisively crushing faith," Reilly writes, "but of a future in which the godless and godly cozily co-exist, respecting each other's convictions and even making common cause on issues of mutual concern.

It would be hard to imagine a pair of books about vegetarianism that are quite so different as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (which we brought you earlier this month on the podcast) and ALICIA SILVERSTONE's The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet

Someday soon, political strategists will look back on the 2008 presidential campaign the way NASA scientists sigh at the Apollo moon landing -- as an example of a way that fighting a big, idealistic fight demanded a period of intense and disruptive innovation. At least, that's the way DAVID PLOUFFE sees it.

Cory Doctorow opens his mouth, and nerdgasms fall out: at any given moment, he's liable to be spouting off about feral robot dogs, space domes over Disney World, or building a haunted hotel modeled after a Quake level ("I'll open-source this idea," says he). And we'd expect nothing less -- after all, he's one of the superclocking brains behind BoingBoing, that exalted bestiary of sweet-ass geekdom.

One night when Jonathan Safran Foer was 9 years old, his babysitter refused to eat chicken. A confused Foer asked her why, and she blew his mind by explaining that the meat on his dinner plate came from a live animal. "I went from thinking it was the most natural thing to thinking it was the most insane thing," Foer said.

^{Al Gore speaks at Harvard Square's First Parish Church}

Standing before a sea of green-leaning Cambridge liberals (who would later scoff heartily at the suggestion that the average person watches roughly 5 hours of TV per day), Al Gore announced: "My own personal journey on the issue of the climate crisis began here in Cambridge 42 years ago, when I walked into the classroom of Roger Revelle

John Irving writes overwrought, Dickensian novels, and he’s damned proud of it. The New England-born author spent much of his reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday night defending himself against imaginary criticisms of his work — criticisms that were remarkably similar to the New York Times’ review of Irving’s new book, Last Night in Twisted River

It's been a year since that night in Chicago, which for photographer SCOUT TUFANKJIAN was the end of a two-year journey that had started with a New Hampshire book tour by the then-junior Senator from Illinois, who had not yet declared his intention to run for the nation's highest office.

A year ago tomorrow we woke up and elected the first-ever black President. A couple of weeks ago at the Boston Book Festival, a panel of pundits kicked off what is sure to be an avalanche of first-year retrospectives on the Obama presidency. Surprise: nobody's happy. And this, folks, is the loyal opposition.

LANI GUINIER says the first year of Obama has been marked by the "dis-involvement of all the people who helped make him president in the first place," adding that if he sticks to his current course, it will be "very dificult to accomplish the change he promised and that we need."

Photo via the Harvard Crimson

As the audience was filing into last night's "The Wire at Harvard" panel, Professor Lawrence Bobo leaned over and spoke to Bubbles.

"You saved it for me," Bobo said.

"I saved it for you?"

"In the last show, when poor Duquan went down," said Bobo. "I said, 'At least I got Bubbles.

Jonathan Lethem seems the ultimate New Yorker: Born and raised in Brooklyn, the 45-year-old writer first earned literary cachet with his 1999 crime fiction novel, Motherless Brooklyn. His 2003 The Fortress of Solitude is a semi-autobiographic work, also set in Brooklyn. Now, Lethem's touring to promote his newest New York novel, Chronic City, in which narrator Chase Insteadman (a former child actor) befriends an eccentric, marijuana-pumped culture writer named Perkus Tooth.

Photo by Boston Book Festival via Flickr

It was hard not to feel cheerleaderish during Saturday's inaugural BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL, which crammed 90 authors into 40 or so hour-long programs in and around Copley Square, and drew lines-around-the-block crowds for . . . well, people talking about and reading from books.

^{Malcolm McDowell at Rock & Shock 2009}

Starting tomorrow, metal worshipers will be descending on the House of Blues for two nights of "mind-throttling chasm-fording riff salad" (as Daniel Brockman so elegantly put it in last week's show preview) with High on Fire, Mastodon, and hometown-pride-instilling acts Converge, legendary hardcore heavies from Salem, MA, and Dethklok (the essentially fictional but wholly brutal cartoon band fronted by Berklee/Comedy Studio alum and Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small).

If you ever happen to find yourself in England and you run into a neurotic middle-aged Londoner, a kid who asks strings of naive questions, and a music nerd who defines himself by his favorite band, then you’ve probably stumbled into a Nick Hornby novel.

Anyone who’s cracked the spine of High Fidelity or About a Boy won’t be surprised that Hornby’s new book Juliet, Naked contains his signature set of lovable, music-obsessed neurotics, as well as liberal dollops of his wry humor.