“Poor Charlie,” the Kingston Trio sang, “may ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston,” his trip on the MTA subway having gone awry because of a nickel increase. But fare change or no, navigating any big-city transit system is a task that would daunt even Theseus. The world’s largest—those in Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, […]

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This summer, the world will turn its eyes toward China to watch the Olympic flame take its first-ever journey to the People’s Republic. Over the course of about two weeks in August, Beijing will present us with the greatest spectacle on earth. The makeover of the capital city will be complete: construction projects finished, buildings repainted, streets spotless, children smiling, and Communist Party officials happily applauding the dazzling sporting feats of the visiting nations.

Earth art, that consummately American movement that sprang up during the high–Vietnam War era, combined a steely-eyed commitment to the truth of materials and to the power of basic geometric forms with a desire to get off the grid or at the very least “expand the field” of sculpture. Sometimes called environmental or Land art, or Earthworks, depending on its practitioner, it demanded of its actual, physical viewers—“fit, though few,” as John Milton might have said—a pilgrim’s willingness to go on the road to remote places in order to see the works and experience the landscapes that they reframed and

The prolific anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel has become, since the publication in 1996 of A History of Reading, one of the foremost gentleman scholars of books and the act of consuming them. In 2000, he wrote Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate, which narrates the stories told by an idiosyncratic selection of artworks and images, and he followed that in 2004 with A Reading Diary, which chronicles his experience rereading twelve favorite books in a year. Now, in The Library at Night, Manguel meditates on repositories of books, his thoughts provoked by the construction, next to his

Though he lacks Will Eisner’s urbane, insouciant spirit and Jack Cole’s sensuous, ever-surprising plasticity, comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917–94) more than deserves the royal sobriquet with which he’s been crowned. King Kirby embodies the drama of his medium as well as the drama of its history—how, starting on the eve of World War II, a bunch of mainly working-class, first-generation Jewish kids created a garish, subliterary mythology of fantastic supermen. Kirby’s first such creature, created with Joe Simon, was Captain America: The premiere issue, which appeared nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, has the masked and star-spangled hero using his

In the winter of 1831, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, creator and appreciator of all things Kunst, was feeling blue. His loyal attendants, sympathetic to the great man’s depression, had heard of a taciturn Genevan educator who, in his spare time, wrote and drew farcical picture-stories to amuse himself and his students. So Frédéric Soret, tutor to the Duke of Weimar’s children and translator of one of Goethe’s scientific works, obtained one of these illustrated manuscripts and, placing it into Goethe’s hands, stepped aside. Thankfully, the gamble paid off: Goethe found the book “very amusing,” and it gave him “extraordinary pleasure,”

More than four decades have passed since readers made the acquaintance of a figure who has assumed an almost mythological role in the stories that are sometimes told about the way we live now. This was the bricoleur, introduced into the cultural conversation by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the opening pages of The Savage Mind at the high tide of structuralism in the early 1960s. The bricoleur is, simply, a kind of handyman. Unlike the carpenter or the electrician, he has no particular set of tools or domain of expertise. He can perform any number of tasks, but his knack is

A last gasp of sorts—or maybe a sputter—The Devil Gets His Due collects fifty years’ worth of criticism from that other rebellious Jewish literary son of Newark, Leslie Fiedler. Once the bad boy of cultural crit, Fiedler today seems quaint, which isn’t exactly his fault. By now, everybody—or at least everybody acquainted with cultural studies—knows what was really going on between Ishmael and Queequeg, but Fiedler was there first in 1948, when he argued for the centrality of the homoerotic male bond and the “dark skinned beloved” to American literature in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”