AGAINST INTERPRETATION ROCK & ROLL & by Robert Christgau Rod Stewart finds a brand-new batch of catchy and literate songs he can put his mark on Aware that not even Kazaa-impaired boomers will buy the same formula forever, Clive Davis bends...

WHEN YOU READ Walt Whitman, do you interpret his poetry to ascertain its meaning? Or do you grapple with finding order in the tumult of his clauses, an experience that embodies the experience of the new democratic order Whitman was celebrating? The so-called "death...

The world's biggest source of employment is for the first time the services sector, rather than agriculture and industry, a U.N. report said Thursday.Some 40 percent of the world's workers are now employed in the services sector, compared with 38.7 percent in agriculture and 21.3...

Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis AG on Thursday said its profit dropped 45 percent drop in fourth-quarter and cited restructuring costs and a weak performance in the U.S. market.Total earnings attributable to shareholders dropped to $904 million (616.4 million euros) in the three months ended Dec....

The chief commodity of Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, according to its author and her reviewers, is a modern sensibility. Stress the modernity here, since she is distinguished less by a decided or passionate point of view … than by an eagerness to explore anything new. At times this eagerness lapses deliberately into inarticulateness, as in her celebrated essay on Camp, which will probably be unintelligible in ten years. At its best—for example in the essay on Happenings—...