Human testimony is basic to the courtroom pursuit of justice. But if one follows the news, one must feel queasy about what people remember and say under oath. Using DNA, the Innocence Project has so far exonerated more than two hundred people wrongfully convicted of crimes in the United States. In nearly four-fifths of the cases, according to one study, the convictions were based at least in part on eyewitness identification. Besides that, informants mistestified, sometimes to clear themselves. Defendants confessed to crimes they didn’t commit.

As I write this, I’m humming the opening bars of Schumann’s Papillons (1829–31), one of his earliest compositions for piano, a piece I haven’t played, let alone heard, in at least six years. I can recall these notes because I remember the visceral pleasure of playing an ascending scale in octaves, the sense of expansiveness—like a butterfly’s wings unfolding—and of flight. Papillons was one of many pieces I learned as a competent (but undisciplined) amateur, yet it was one of the few I returned to again and again, even as I moved on to the Beethoven sonatas and Rachmaninoff preludes

I guess we really live for good writeups, but not at the sacrifice of our principles. —Jackie Robinson to Caroline Wallerstein, January 3, 1956 It is clear that by the time Jackie Robinson’s final autobiography, I Never Had It Made, appeared, in 1972, the year he died, he saw himself as more than a star athlete. Over half the book is devoted to his career after baseball, when he became something of a black man of affairs or, in the tradition of black propagandists like Hubert H. Harrison and W. E. B. DuBois, a professional race man. Robinson might

(There is a tendency to represent sports, especially football, in bellicose terms. From the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, perched high upon their steeds in the iconic photograph, to the storied Steel Curtain defensive line of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, with its cold-war-ish nickname, the chatter around football revels in combat vocabulary.

There is a man in a blue suit and a green and red skullcap piloting a red plane across a yellow sky. Crossing a lush jungle valley, he spots thousands of “gigantic royal panthers” and instantly declares: “I CAN USE THEM IN MY PLAN TO WRECK CIVILIZATION!” Though the colorful and crudely drawn adventure comics gathered in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! read like the fevered imaginings of Henry Darger’s bully older brother, they are, in fact, the garish and terrifying work of Fletcher Hanks.

Anarchist and aesthete, Félix Fénéon was a pivotal, if not unavoidable, figure in fin de siècle Paris. He promoted the careers of Seurat, Bonnard, and Toulouse-Lautrec; a regular at Mallarmé’s salon, he edited Rimbaud’s Illuminations and published the first public edition of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror. Failure to publish a book of his own (at least during his lifetime) didn’t inhibit his reputation as an elegant stylist, though much of what he wrote appeared anonymously. Such was the case when, in 1906, he began producing three-line items for the Parisian daily Le Matin. The results of this six-month occupation have