Is Tintin literature? It’s a good question, and one that launches novelist Tom McCarthy’s book-length study of the Belgian artist Hergé’s masterwork, the ad­ventures of the boy reporter with the comma-shaped hairdo. The French have already made up their minds about Tintin’s literary merit: McCarthy’s bibliography lists works by the playwright and academic Jean-Marie Apostolidès and the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, as well as the philosopher Michel Serres’s multivolume Hermès, a chapter of which is devoted to Hergé’s 1963 album, The Castafiore Emerald. (One might add to this list Thomas Sertillanges’s odd La Vie quotidienne à Moulinsart, which considers Tintin less

In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle of friends “organ recitals.”)

During the 2003 Adorno centenary, something remarkable happened in Germany. The entire nation reached out to embrace this renegade Marxist philosopher in ways that were truly surprising. Throughout the country, Adorno “festivals” took place—apotheoses of the public celebrations advocated in Rousseauesque “civil religion.” In Frankfurt-am-Main, where Adorno taught and where he remains something of a legend, there is now an Adorno-Platz that features, instead of the customary bust, his writing desk, bizarrely encased in glass. A plethora of public exhibitions tracing his life and thought were mounted. Concerts featuring his musical com­­p­o­sitions—most of which resemble Vienna School pastiches—were widely staged

On August 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon gave the first speech outlining his domestic program. Its centerpiece was legislation proposing a federal income floor of sixteen hundred dollars for every American family—in today’s money, almost ten thousand dollars. In this, Nixon’s perpetually active political antennae were failing him; seven months earlier, Gallup had asked its sample, “Would you favor or oppose such a plan?” and 62 percent were against it. But the idea of a “guaranteed minimum income” then commanded such great assent in all the best policy-intellectual circles that this Republican president, elected with the solid support of

Late this winter, a minor media furor rose up around the tirelessly debated question of ultimate culpability for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dallas district attorney Craig Watkins announced at a press conference that he had discovered a cache of documents and effects deposited in a safe decades ago by one of his predecessors, Henry Wade, that seemed to open new avenues of controversy in the who-shot-JFK industry. One especially sensational find—labeled a potential “smoking gun” in breathless cable-news coverage—was a transcript suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had openly plotted to kill the president on

In 1982, smack in the middle of cold-war angst, Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer interviewed architect and philosopher Paul Virilio about nuclear war and technology. Their densely layered dialogue was published the following year as Pure War, which introduced Virilio’s thinking to the United States. Last year, the pair met to reevaluate their earlier arguments, and the reissue of Pure War includes this new conversation and a fresh introduction.

“An outbreak, like a story, should have a coherent plot.” That comment, from a well-known virologist, could easily serve as epigram or foil to Contagious, Priscilla Wald’s critique of the stories that the media and the medical profession have constructed about disease outbreaks from typhoid to HIV/aids to Ebola.

A chance remark serving as catalyst for a profound journey of self-discovery sounds more becoming of postmodernist author Paul Auster than historical novelist Amin Maalouf. Yet the Lebanese writer of such acclaimed novels as Leo Africanus (1986), The Rock of Tanios (1993), and Balthasar’s Odyssey (2000) took inspiration for his latest book from an unexpected question about a Cuban Maalouf, and Origins, a memoir-cum–family history, is the product of the author’s plunge into his Orthodox/Catholic/Protestant clan’s recent past.

Honor Moore could be said to walk barefoot on broken glass in her poems as well as in accounts of her family history, as though discovering hidden truths were a searing ordeal. Pain is a dark radiance in Moore’s work, but it is subsumed by the strong current of her curiosity, by compassionate analysis, and by pleasure in expressing complex feelings in supple language. And not only are her tales of family dramatic and provocative, they also compose a microcosm of American history.

In one of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s better-known photos, a woman stands on a tile map of southern Italy, her sandal-clad feet atop Capri and the Bay of Naples. Of this gentle Colossus bestriding sea and craggy coast, we see only green shoes, bare ankles, and the hem of a dress. Picture taking may be a bit of magic, but geography is also just another trick of the eye: The actual world’s always bigger than we can physically embrace but not bigger than we can show. Subverting traditional landscape photography’s heroic impulse, Ghirri prized representational antics over the mere grandeur

Are the changing fortunes of a nation always visible on the faces of its citizens? The first set of photographs of young Malians in Malick Sidibé’s Chemises dates from March 1962, less than two years after Mali gained its independence. The new president, Modibo Keita, pursued a socialist policy, aligning the country with the Communist bloc. Midway through the book, we find pictures taken on November 2, 1968, days before a bloodless military coup. Some of the book’s last images date from 1976, two years after the end of a devastating drought and shortly before the start of student protests