Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

Hans Keilson’s story is one worth telling and retelling. The German-born doctor and writer’s years hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands, his membership with the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, and his groundbreaking work as a psychotherapist dealing with the treatment of trauma in Jewish children after the war are all fascinating topics—all the more so when you realize that he did these things in the first half of his 101-year life (he died in 2011). And somehow, during all of this, he found time to write books. In 2010, FSG released two of Keilson’s novels, 1959’s The Death

In Beijing, the news that Chinese writer Mo Yan will win the Nobel Prize was greeted with elation. Simultaneously, a storm of controversy welled. Did this writer deserve the prize? And should a prize of this magnitude go to a writer who is “inside the system” of an authoritarian government that imprisons other writers?

In Self-Control, a novel by the Norwegian writer Stig Sæterbakken, an aging creature of habit named Andreas Felt goes on a rampage. At least he thinks its a rampage. To others, his behavior amounts to a number of small if calculated attacks on social politesse. Vying for the attention of his daughter Marit over the course of a lunch date, Andreas casually (and untruthfully) mentions his impending divorce from her mother. Returning to work, he vehemently upbraids the head of the company. Later, he humiliates a boorish family friend named Hans-Jacob over dinner and grossly over-tips a waitress.

IN A RECENT TIME magazine profile, the renowned German artist Gerhard Richter confessed his admiration for John Cage, particularly the composer’s famous dictum on poetry, “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Cage substituted silence for actual notes, and Richter, in recent works of epic reproduction, substitutes multiplication for brushstrokes. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the artist’s book Patterns, a dizzyingly intense exploration of one of his works, 1990’s Abstract Painting (724-4). Richter digitally divided an image of that artwork a dozen times (then split those divisions