I swear I heard Wolf Blitzer distinguish between facts that were facts and facts that weren’t facts in the spin room at CNN after one of the recent presidential debates. Also in the run-up to the election: the Tampa Bay Times produced over 800 fact-checks, sending their Truth-o-Meter careering all over the screen; Rachel Maddow bemoaned the degradation, if not the total annihilation, of The Fact; Time ran a cover story on “The Fact Wars”; and FactCheck.org catalogued the Whoppers of 2012, enumerating the false or deceptive claims made by both the Democratic and Republican campaigns. Politifact.com

It might take a few hermeneutic gymnastics to spot hipsters moodily haunting Western literature, in soliloquy and idleness. But “hipster” is a pliant enough term that you can apply it to a number of disaffected young literary characters, straddling social strata in either good or bad faith. Consider the aristocrat’s ennui that seeps from Hamlet downward, to Wordsworth, Flaubert, all the golden Russians, Salinger, Franzen. These types usually arise in youth and fortune, squander both, and go belly-up when middle-age or financial realities reassert themselves. Weimar Republic hipsters have recently

One of the drawbacks of working in a bookstore, something I did for many years, is that it can be like working in a small-town pharmacy: You learn things about people you might rather not know.

A reader could easily run out of adjectives to describe Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. The first ones that come to mind are: maddening, bold, repetitious, judgmental, intemperate, erudite, reductive, shrewd, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, provocative, pompous, penetrating, perspicacious and pretentious.

‘Sometimes,’ Philip Larkin wrote in a letter, ‘I think I’m preparing for a huge splenetic autobiography, denigrating everyone I’ve ever known: it would have to be left to the nation in large brass-bound boxes, to be printed when all of us are dead.’ In the event he arranged to have his diaries shredded a few days before his death in 1985. But there was enough spleen and denigration to go round in the stuff preserved by ambiguous clauses in his will

One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance, and even then the endless tide of deferred chores and anticipated engagements never ceases to break on our attention.

In the afterword to his translation of Jakob Wassermann's My First Wife, a scrupulous account of his divorce from his wife of 20 years, Michael Hofmann quotes Rilke: "In the depths, everything becomes law." The divorce of man and woman is one such depth, an anti-tale of many inversions: Love becomes hate, unanimity becomes animosity, shared interests become competing claims, alliance becomes war; and everything that seemed fleshly and human and natural, everything for which it might appear impossible to legislate—trust, generosity, self-sacrifice, nurture, belief itself—everything does indeed