A few weeks ago, the New York Times Travel section ran an article about how best to spend a day out in Oxford, England. The author advised readers down which streets they should wander and into which sequestered quads they should peep, from Worcester College, with its sunken lawn in the west, along the cobblestones of Brasenose Lane, past the eighteenth-century shops of Broad Street, as far as Magdalen College’s picturesque deer park in the east.

In 1999, after an impressive career as an investigative journalist, author, and critic, Nicols Fox took up bookselling on idyllic Mount Desert Island in Maine, home of Acadia National Park. I recently discussed the transfor­mations her little bookshop has undergone there, first operating out of her small Bass Harbor home, then from a picture-perfect shop front in affluent Southwest Harbor three miles away, and most recently as a “virtual bookshop” on the Web. As author of Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives (Island Press, 2002), Fox has described the historical importance of resisting

While ferociously pious, Jonathan Edwards was also way into metaphysics. Thanks to Jeremiah Dummer’s gift of five hundred volumes, which began making their way into the Yale library in 1714, the undergraduate Edwards enthusiastically discovered Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, and—most crucially for Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism—an edition of Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704), which Edwards read time and time again. From the repetition of Samuel Clarke’s Latin translation of Newton’s English version of Opticks, Richardson finds etched into Edward’s later sermonic rhetoric a prismatic network of “light” (lumen), and from this link, she distills her fascinating premise: Attention to

About halfway into his memoir, André Schiffrin notes that after his father died in 1950, André and his mother lived on New York ‘s Upper East Side on only a few hundred dollars per year, well below the city’s poverty line. Yet as the distinguished French-born editor of the New Press explains, he never felt lower-class: Back when his family lived in Paris, his mother had detailed the different layers of the French bourgeoisie, concluding that “[o]n top of them all were the intellectuals. That was us, and therefore there was never any question of our feeling underprivileged.” Though Schiffrin

Aline Kominsky Crumb was born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in Long Beach, New York, in 1948 and grew up in a chaotic household behind a tidy suburban facade. Her mother came from a well-to-do family and found success as an ad agent; her father was a small-time businessman and possible small-time crook, who died of cancer when his daughter was nineteen. Her escape into the counterculture of the 1960s led her to New York City, Tucson (with her first husband, Carl Kominsky), and, finally, San Francisco, where she became prominent in the underground comix scene of the late part of the

“You know, all my life, my favorite kind of story is one that starts early in the 20th century, and then works its way on down toward modern times.” Kim Deitch, both the author of and a protagonist in Alias the Cat, explains exactly where he intends to take us in his latest book—and more than delivers. A revered underground cartoonist whose work is steeped in the lore and traditions of early animation, Deitch draws loopy, crowded, psychedelic stories that start where the Fleischer brothers’ Betty Boop and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat left off and add in sex, money,

In the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, the windows of the Gap, the national purveyor of affordable and non-threatening attire, are papered over and a to lease sign has been posted. But across from this empty storefront, Hot Topic is booming. Discordant music pours from an arched entrance meant to resemble a dungeon, and the red-and-purple-striped tights and silver-studded jewelry here sell for double the price of khakis and blue button-downs. That goth attire flourishes while more mainstream options languish is a cultural phenomenon on which academics have finally set their sights—with sometimes illuminating and sometimes predictable results.

Perhaps it would have been more of a surprise, in retrospect, had Tommie Smith not done what he did at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, considering the times. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, an event that triggered rioting and rebellion in major cities across the United States and for many, black and white, signaled the end of the best hope of the civil rights movement. In June, Senator Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. He was running because President Lyndon Johnson had stunningly chosen not

Photographer Danny Lyon has spent much of his career documenting the overlooked and underreported, be it an outlaw motorcycle gang (The Bikeriders [1968]) or the nineteenth-century buildings demolished to make way for the World Trade Center (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan [2005]). In 1967, his quest to photograph society’s outsiders took him to the Texas Department of Corrections. There, Lyon knew he would find a subject most people had never seen. (It would be four more years before the tragic Attica uprising brought prison life into public consciousness.) In a facility nicknamed “the Walls,” he met career criminal James Ray

Neither the seventy-million dollars that Zack Snyder’s adaptation of 300 made on its opening weekend nor the more than two hundred million dollars it has grossed in the United States alone as of this writing can be attributed primarily to the readers of Frank Miller’s original graphic novel. (Miller’s book, while a cult item among comic aficionados, was never much of a crossover success, but even for best sellers, the number of viewers for a hit adaptation is far greater than the number of readers.) And yet within weeks of the film’s release, Hollywood studios green-lit other graphic-novel adaptations, eager

There’s an exquisite serendipity to reading Carolyn Brown’s soulful new memoir recounting twenty years as a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company––from its inception in 1953––on Cunningham’s birthday (April 16, to be exact). At eighty-eight, Cunningham continues to make remarkable dances and to collaborate with composers and artists in a variety of media, all the while wondrously experimenting with new technologies and processes. It feels especially meaningful, even poignant, to look back fifty-four years to the beginning.