Books are like balms — grabbing the right book at the right time can provide the perfect antidote for what you’re going through at that very moment. Whether you need a dose of hope, happiness, comfort ...

The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite If Jessica Waite’s highly-anticipated 2024 memoir doesn’t win an award for one of the most outrageous book titles of the year, something is wrong ...

Mr. Belth is the author of the Substack newsletter “Dig This With Alex Belth.” ...

One of the easiest ways of convincing kids of the joy of reading is to read funny books. Funny books help instill a positive impression about books and reading, assist in diffusing the difficulties ...

I am concerned about how my book club scheduled for next Thursday at the time of this writing is going to go. Given that I’ve been telling people what to read for better than a decade in these pages, ...

We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we love. Promise. When we're in need of some laughs (and, I mean, who isn't these days?) we all love a good standup ...

The Gemara (Nedarim 50b-51a) tells a story about Bar Kapara. Once Bar Kapara tried to make Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi laugh, his best joke was coating a basket with tar so that wheat couldn’t come out and ...

THE DO-GOODERS by Alfred Grossman. 229 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Nowhere is the literature of the put-on so prevalent as in the area of grey humor, the pale imitation of black humor. Kookiness serves ...

John Kenney is one of six brothers. In 2019, when his brother Tom, a firefighter who spent a week at Ground Zero in 2001, was dying of cancer, Kenney went to visit him one last time. As they were ...

Author and sociologist Raúl Pérez attended a diverse university in California that promoted mutual respect among students, "yet after hours, in the dorms, I saw many boundaries tested with racial ...

“We’ve found that humor—this mindset of levity—is perhaps one of the best ways to mitigate all of those possible regrets,” Aaker tells me. “It allows you to be bolder because you’re able to diffuse ...

Jason Travis Ott has built a social-media fanbase by catering to logophiles. “Grandiloquent Words” draws together some of his favorite examples of exotic names for mundane objects and phenomena, which ...