“I hate to read new books.”

—William Hazlitt, “On Reading Old Books”

I am really not much of a rereader. I envy people who are, but it’s not in my blood. Over the past twelve months, I’ve rarely picked up a book for rereading for any reason other than professional necessity. For the most part, editions of old books matter little to me. I confess I love my Penguin edition of J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday—which I recently reread because I was writing about My Dog Tulip—with its cerise-striped cover, the words “Travel and Adventure” stamped along the

Indoctrination into the practices of modern motherhood can feel like showing up at Navy SEAL training camp without any discernible desire to, say, swim several miles through strong ocean waves fully clothed, and then proceed to trudge through the sand for fifteen miles in wet boots. Even with hormonally induced romantic notions about bonding with this small, as-yet-unseen human, it can be tough not to feel wishy-washy among the hard-core marines of motherhood. The current ideal seems to call for a total surrender to the baby’s putative desires—natural childbirth, home birthing, on-demand

Americans who have lived abroad know that the rest of the world is mildly obsessed with the CIA. I live in Istanbul, and early on I learned that many Turks believe CIA agents can pull off everything from September 11 to the election of Islamists; what’s more, they suspect I might be a spy, too. In this view of the world, some foreign influence is always responsible for something, some outside group is always “fomenting chaos” somewhere, some lethal CIA squad is always making it look like the leftists bombed the rightists by bombing the rightists themselves. At first, to this innocent and trusting

When Daniel Levin Becker was sixteen, he made a mixtape that included only songs and artists whose names did not contain the letter e. Soon after, he read Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the offending vowel. Levin Becker spent a good part of his formative years “making the numbers and letters on license plates into mathematically true statements,” so he was heartened to discover that he was “not alone in appreciating naturally occurring palindromes, or knowing a shorter sentence with all the letters in the alphabet than The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy

WHAT DOES NOT INITIALLY MEET THE EYE in Richard Mosse’s vivid photographs of cotton-candy hillsides, vamping child soldiers, and rose-hued rebels is the violence of their setting: the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Congo. Located near the border of Rwanda, Kivu has been ground zero for many of the worst atrocities of a civil war that has displaced millions and persisted intermittently for more than a decade. But Mosse, an Irish-born, Yale-educated photographer, has no interest in documenting the crisis from the sober vantage point of a war correspondent. Instead, he works with a wooden

LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s list, omits Rodgers and Hart’s final verse, in which a lover appears and the blue moon turns gold; instead, the song remains steadfastly lovelorn.

So does “Hollow Hills,” the Bauhaus track that inspired Sasnal to become an artist. He’d copy

SWIMMING POOLS. MOVIE STARS. The Clampetts found them when they moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. And they are what you find in this portable summer-between-covers collection of SoCal pool photos that feature the likes of Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe, assorted muscle boys, starlets, society dames, and just plain kids romping round the cement ponds. The shimmering aqua-blue parentheses in an otherwise bone-dry landscape are the locale’s most iconic domestic feature; what the stoop is to New York City, the poolside chaise lounge is to La La Land. If the stoop constitutes the border between home